


Reversals

by Guede



Category: King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, Break Up, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Jealousy, Lovers to Friends, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-06
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:28:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 43,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21688369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: War leads to strange bedfellows. Arthur and the Britons are stationed on the Sarmatian border, and events soon throw them into an uneasy truce with the very people they've been fighting against for so long.
Relationships: Arthur Castus/Guinevere, Arthur Castus/Lancelot, Galahad/Tristan (King Arthur 2004)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

“And how is the great commander?” The voice was low and strangely rough, and the body that swung into the room was exceptionally slender even for a Briton soldier.

Arthur leaned back and rolled his shoulders, wincing whenever he strained a cramped muscles, before he turned about to face the rather insolent…“Someday, they’re going to notice how remarkably you fill out those clothes and we’ll all be in trouble.”

From the look of her grin, Guinevere didn’t particularly care. She doffed her clumsy-looking helmet and dropped into the nearest chair, lounging about as well as anyone could in light armor. In truth, only the tight bun at the back of her head would’ve given her away; thanks to tight bindings, her front was flat beneath the heavy cloak and light armor, and the line of her jaw was uncommonly hard for a woman, though her features were quite beautiful. “It’s worked this long. Besides, our…superior Roman authorities barely show up often enough to keep us paid, let alone to notice me. Or to restock or reinforce the garrison. Honestly, Arthur, if the women didn’t fight, you’d be in very desperate straits.”

“I know.” Her comment pointedly reminded Arthur of the laborious accounting he’d been doing when she had come in. He turned back to his desk and distastefully eyed the calculations emerging on his sheets. “Though I have a feeling that even if I didn’t need the soldiers, you’d still manage to show up on the battlefield.”

“Of course.” Guinevere could stay so still that even insects didn’t detect her presence, but apparently, she didn’t feel like doing so at the moment. She rolled back onto her feet and crossed to Arthur’s desk, where she put her hands on his shoulders and leaned over him. “What’s wrong?”

He glanced up at her, smiling a little when he saw how the dying light silvered her white throat. Her fingers were casually massaging his sore muscles, deftly working out the knots and aches, and he was seriously tempted to simply pillow his head on her bound breasts and go to sleep. Given that he hadn’t had a full night’s rest in days, he certainly could use it.

“Arthur.” She flicked a questioning glance at him, and the arch of her eyebrow indicated that she wouldn’t suffer any dissembling.

Well, Guinevere hadn’t earned her position simply because she was good in bed—though she was—and after Merlin, she was the best officer Arthur had. She did have a right to know what was going on.

Nevertheless, Arthur was reluctant to retrieve the newly-arrived dispatches and select the pertinent one for her viewing. He handed over the slender scroll and forced himself to stay while she slowly absorbed the contents of the terse, compressed Latin script. Though Guinevere didn’t share Arthur’s love of scholarly pursuits, she did have an excellent command of multiple languages. In that context, she took an unusually long time to read through a few short paragraphs.

When she finished, she snapped shut the scroll with a sharp, angry gesture. “Goths.”

“We’ve known for years that they were angling for Sarmatia and the lands south of here.” Arthur spoke in his mildest tone in hopes that it might temper the outburst he knew was coming.

“Of course we have. And of course, Rome has done little to prepare for the advance, trusting that the native peoples and the famous Briton garrison will be sufficient to hold them back.” Guinevere flung the scroll at the desk as if it were a dagger and stomped to the far end of the tent, where she stood with her back to Arthur and her fists clenched to her sides.

Three breaths went by without a movement from either of them. Then Guinevere spun around and stared at Arthur, wrapping her arms around herself. Surprisingly enough, her eyes were not full of righteous indignation, but of resigned sorrow. “This land isn’t what we’re suited for, you know. We’ve been here long enough to learn to fight in legions—even on horseback--but we’re not meant for the steppes. And I’m the first generation that will be allowed to return to Britain after discharge—that wouldn’t have been for another nine years, but I was looking forward to it.”

“You still should be. You will live to get those discharges. I swear it.” Alarmed by the dullness of her tone, Arthur got up and started to move toward her, but she waved him off.

“No, no. It’s not that hard to understand, anyway—my forebears rebelled, but they fought so well that the Romans thought exile to Sarmatia would yield more than a massacre. And really, it was an excellent idea. If I’d been the Roman in charge, I probably would’ve done the same.” She returned to her chair and spun it around so she could straddle it. Long years of practice at deception meant that her stance was loose and masculine, but with a refreshing unconsciousness that Arthur found quite appealing. “It’s only—Visigoths? As if the Sarmatians themselves weren’t bad enough.”

Arthur also resumed his seat and started pulling maps toward himself, taking refuge in planning. If they could work on defenses and possible strategies, then perhaps everything else would start falling in place. If not, then they at least would have the luxury of falling apart behind strong walls.

That was an uncommonly cynical thought for him, and he paused for a moment before rejecting it.

“I think we’ve figured out how to beat the Sarmatian heavy cavalry with our infantry, and your light horse is just about par with their raiding parties. The Goths, on the other hand, are unknown quantities.” With swift, precise motions, Arthur started marking out relative positions with a bit of chalk. That chore took far less time than it should have, due to the scantiness of the provided intelligence. They’d have to start implementing measures to make up that shortfall.

As she never could resist a military discussion, Guinevere was soon back by the desk, pointing out weak points that needed shoring up and vigorously arguing with Arthur about priorities. She’d been right in that they’d been sorely neglected, and as stretched thin as they already were, it was going to be difficult to cover their entire sphere of responsibility.

“Look, all the villages this side of the river are—well, about as friendly as you can get in Sarmatia, but these? Arthur, we just had a raiding party from that direction last week!” Snarling more than pouting, she derisively flicked her fingers at the patch of map under discussion.

“Exactly. They’re already ramped up for warfare, and you and I both know that there’s no love lost between the Sarmatians and the Goths.” Arthur glanced up to see the stubbornness still lingering her eyes, then bowed his head and raked fingers through his hair. It’d been newly cropped, and the barber hadn’t been particularly gentle so tender spots were plentiful along his hairline. He hissed at the sting.

Concerned, Guinevere reached for him, but he intercepted her hand and used that hold to draw her to him, so close their noses were touching. “Guinevere. If I had another choice, I would take it. But—” he closed his eyes, not wanting to see the disappointment in her face “—but there isn’t. We need more soldiers.”

“I know. I just hate it,” she finally replied, soft and slow. Their foreheads bumped for a few more seconds, and then she tilted her head so their lips met.

A moment later they were throwing themselves apart and whipping around to face the raucous chaos outside the window. Arthur was through the hallway and at the commotion in the space of two breaths, where he found several soldiers using pikes to hold two rearing, panicking stallions at bay. On the horses’ backs were bloody bundles of leather and metal that lurched and groaned with every buck. A particularly high kick by one of the horses nearly sent one flying off. It also revealed a pale, sweating face and a cool bright eye.

“Hold them! Damn it, get them calm!” While he was yelling orders, Arthur was also following them. He timed the nearest horse’s plunging and, when it was coming down, swiftly slipped in to seize its bridle.

The horse tossed him about as if his weight were no more than that of a butterfly’s. A hoof whistled past his head, a hairsbreadth from cracking his skull open. Then everything skewed as someone else grabbed onto the other side; the stallion went down and Arthur rushed to soothe the animal into staying that way. Over its nose, he could see other soldiers doing the same to the second horse—and Guinevere’s face, pale with outrage. “You are the stupidest man on earth,” she hissed.

“I thought the Romans didn’t use women in the army,” interrupted a thready voice. It was the rider, a young Sarmatian man, and his strained amusement seemed to be the only thing holding him together.

“I’m Briton, not Roman,” Guinevere snapped back. “And I hear you let your women fight as well.”

Racking coughs from the other rider caught their attention, but only Arthur turned. Since they didn’t yet know the affiliation of these Sarmatians, it wasn’t wise to deem them harmless no matter how injured they appeared to be. Again the cynicism made Arthur wince, but he’d been too long in the country to not appreciate its sense. “Where did you come from and what happened?”

“We do let our women fight,” answered the other man. Curly hair matted down with drying blood, a resentful expression and a posture that bespoke at least severe bruising of the ribs, and more likely a few cracked ones. “Not that it did any good. Those fucking Goths—raped them with pricks and swords, and—and—damn it, it’s so awful we have to come to you.”

“Where?” Arthur could hear Guinevere already shouting orders, getting the garrison mobilized. Goths…a scouting party, perhaps. But already? The Empire’s intelligence wasn’t that weak, and he was in a position to know since he spent most of his time trying to milk information out of his contrary colleagues, who saw little reason to help a garrison staffed with known malcontents.

The man he was facing was taken by another fit of coughing and started to tumble off. Both Arthur and the other Sarmatian lunged for him, which consequently found Arthur in the unenviable position of trying to catch two men at once. He somehow managed it, then gratefully handed off the curly-haired one to Merlin, who’d finally arrived. Being more skilled in medicinal arts than most surgeons, Merlin carried his burden to a clear spot, pinned the man down, and promptly started treating him.

Arthur followed with the other Sarmatian, who was rasping details with a mouth that looked as if it’d been broken with a club. No doubt it was only a few lost teeth that was responsible for all the blood, but it still looked terrible.

“Not…not any of the villages. There was a meeting of tribal leaders…twenty miles from here. North.” The bright eye warily watched Arthur, and with good reason, since the named location was squarely within hostile territory.

“A meeting,” Guinevere repeated, coming up from behind. She was carrying Arthur’s armor and weapons, which he took after carefully helping the Sarmatian lie down.

The man closed his eyes, then opened them. He suddenly grabbed Arthur’s wrist and, ignoring the dagger Guinevere instantly had at his throat, pulled Arthur down. “Yes, we were negotiating. Some of the older ones wanted peace…Rome already bleeds us dry. But the Goths broke the truce.”

“Fucking bast—” Merlin wrenched something back into its socket and the second Sarmatian keened “—fucking bastards. I’ll slaughter them for that.”

“We’ll make them scream,” his comrade agreed. Then he turned back to Arthur, his gaze still disturbingly lucid. “But only if you go now, and save what remains of us.”

Guinevere withdrew her dagger, but the look she gave Arthur was far from blunted. She clearly didn’t trust the men, and when Arthur glanced at Merlin, neither did the other man. But they were waiting for him to answer, believing in him to give the right one.

“We would’ve gone anyway,” Arthur replied as he strapped on his sword. “You’re under Roman rule, and you have the right to demand our protection. Guinevere—”

“—your horse will be here in a minute.” She threw one last glare at the Sarmatians, who met it with equanimity. “And of course, we expect you to support the Empire in return,” she muttered.

Merlin said nothing and continued to treat the Sarmatians as he would any other men, though the look in his eyes told Arthur that the next war council was going to be uncomfortable. The curly-haired Sarmatian flopped back and gritted his teeth against Merlin’s ministrations; now that Arthur was close enough to see past the filth on the man’s face, he could see that the Sarmatian was actually little more than a youth.

The other one was older and calmer, and from the looks of things, had come from one of the eastern tribes. He rolled over on what was apparently the less pained side and patiently waited his turn, eyes fixed on the younger one. “He’s going to help,” he whispered, dialect strangely guttural to Arthur’s ears but just understandable.

“All right, I was wrong. But mark my words, it’s still going to cost us,” the curly-haired one shot back. Also in a Sarmatian tongue.

Arthur briefly weighed the wisdom of revealing this particular advantage so early on, then decided that he needed mutual confidence more than he needed secrecy. “It’ll cost us more,” he said in the same dialect that the curly-haired one had used. “We have to heal you, arm you and feed you in addition to the vexillations stationed here.”

Both Sarmatians jerked to stare at him, pure astonishment in their eyes. The younger one was nearly slack-jawed in his incredulity. “But you’re a Roman!” he gasped.

“My father was a Sarmatian knight—I’m descended from the group that was exiled to Britain. My…Roman name is Artorius Castus, but the Britons call me Arthur.” The last piece of armor clamped its weight to Arthur’s body just as he spotted his horse being led up. With a nod to the Sarmatians, he made for it.

A soft cough made him pause and turn, whereupon the older Sarmatian, expression considerably more respectful, nodded back. “I am Tristan, and this is Galahad.”

“Welcome to the Roman army,” Arthur said, managing a small smile. He knew it would come out ironic, but he had neither the time nor the desire to compose himself into a more deceptively cheerful tone. Darkness and the ravages of war were waiting, and it was all he could do to try and pretend that he could prepare himself for it.

* * *

As was usual with them, the Goths had struck and gone back north to rejoin their brethren, apparently content with the havoc they had wrecked. That was both good and bad: good because that meant Arthur wouldn’t have to waste soldiers engaging them, bad because every single man and woman of the exploratory detachment was in the mood for blood now that they had seen the aftermath. Though Guinevere hated the Sarmatians with the detached implacability that constant fighting against an utterly alien people bred, she wouldn’t have ever wished this on them.

It was hard to differentiate human corpses from those of horses, so hacked up were the majority, and sometimes it was just difficult to tell whether something was an especially gory piece of wood or an arm flayed of every inch of its skin. Toes nestled in entrails that were draped over a sword planted in the ground, as if in claim of the land. A headless woman, sword still in hand, was skewered against a collapsed tent. Another one was still twitching despite a missing right leg and mutilated breasts; it took only a moment for Guinevere to see that it was too late, but it took three for her to slash through the woman’s throat. The Britons were by no means soft in their ideas of war or religion, but this mindless gore was just past too much, even for Guinevere.

Arthur had blanched as soon as they had crested the hill and seen the horror, but he had closed up before she could say anything. In a toneless voice, he had directed the cavalry to dismount and then had organized a systematic search of the mess for survivors while Guinevere saw to the perimeter guard and the trackers. And he hadn’t spared himself afterward, but had gotten down and started wading through the mess himself.

Survivors were pitifully few, and included none of the elders. The Goths must have started during the meeting, so only the younger, less-important delegation members that had been banished to wait outside the main tent had had the time to defend themselves. Clever, the objective part of Guinevere’s mind said.

The subjective part was preoccupied with not gagging as she levered up a large bit of planking, which had probably been part of a wagon bottom, and thus was blasted with a billow of reeking air. But—fresh blood. And movement.

“You found one?” Arthur didn’t wait for an answer, but instead put his shoulder to the planking and shoved it completely free of the surrounding debris to reveal a small hiding space crammed with bodies.

At first, Guinevere thought there was had to be at least five, but then she and Arthur were untangling the limbs and dodging sprays of blood, and she saw that there were at the most two live ones. It seemed as if the two men had crawled beneath when they were too hurt to fight, then jammed the entrance with hacked-off limbs from other bodies. She absently wondered whether it’d been the stench or the blood loss that had made them faint.

Even through gloves, the squish of injured flesh was disgusting. But it provoked a groan that was reassuringly loud, and in the sudden rise of hope that followed, Guinevere forgot her revulsion. She squeezed her arm further inside and carefully maneuvered a leg out of the way, then pulled the man free.

He screamed and spasmed, then fell still, his long sticky hair lashing across her knees. She thought it might be brown once it was clean, but right now it was just a hindrance as she tried to detect a breath. Guinevere leaned over and put her ear beside where she thought his mouth was, then straightened up with a sigh of relief. “I think this one’ll live to see the garrison.”

“Good,” Arthur grunted, still wrestling with the other one. He finally got his arm under the limp form and was dragging it out when the man abruptly woke, wide dark eyes flashing fear and fury at Guinevere over Arthur’s shoulder.

Quick as lightning, Arthur had the other man pinned to him, but gently so none of the visible wounds were stressed. “Shh. We’re not Goths. We’re here to help,” he whispered.

Sarmatian rolled off Arthur’s tongue like silken thunder in a way that never happened when he spoke Latin or even Briton. It was possibly the one aspect of Sarmatia in him that Guinevere enjoyed without reservation.

“You’re Roman,” the other man croaked. Dazed recognition dimly lit his eyes. “Arthur of the Britons…heard of you…”

“Try not to move. We have to move too quick for stretchers, and if you’re going to ride I have to bind your wounds.” Arthur hesitated, then added the inevitable afterthought. “It’s going to hurt.”

The Sarmatian grinned, amusement somehow managing to rise through the bruises and the blood. He half-closed his eyes and laid black curls against Arthur’s shoulder, docile as a young child with a mother. “It usually does.”

Guinevere was busy attending to the one she’d pulled out, but the unusual spark in Arthur’s Sarmatian caught her attention and she kept an eye on him. He was a little older than her, leanly built in a way that must have been embarrassing lankiness until recently. Sword calluses could be made out on both his hands, and the sharp gleam under those long girl’s lashes hinted at much experience.

She was careful to keep him from seeing her watching, but in truth he didn’t even seem to notice that she was there. His gaze slanted on Arthur and stayed on Arthur, even when pain was wracking his entire body.

Once Arthur and she were both done, Arthur waved over a soldier to take charge of Guinevere’s Sarmatian, though he himself carried the man he’d recovered. “I need you in the rearguard,” he said by way of terse explanation.

Guinevere looked at her gory hands and shifted her shoulders to feel the amount of strain that had settled there. “No rest for the wicked. See you back in the garrison, virtuous man.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” But Arthur smiled for a moment, a little of his stone mask falling away. As he walked away, she could hear him diffidently asking the Sarmatian, “What’s your name?”

“Lancelot,” the breeze blew back to Guinevere.


	2. Chapter 2

The closer Lancelot crept towards waking up, the less he wanted to. He could feel the blood rolling off of him, clogging up his mouth and nose, and it was foul-thick- _choking_ \--

“Stop that. Stop!” Female. Annoyed. Shoving down his feeble struggling.

He froze in place, then relaxed, seizing hold of the familiarity of the situation. “My apologies, lady. Do I have the honor of messing up your bed?”

A snort from across the room saw him tense again, but that tweaked a small pool of agony in his right ribs and he bit down on the pillow as he half-curled around himself. His fingers were just feeling out the tight bandages wrapped around himself when the new voice spoke. “You never stop, do you? They’re all fucking _dead_ and you’ve still got enough energy to flirt.”

“Galahad. Last surviving son of your family or not, if you move the cot again I will break your neck.” Tristan sounded as if he was talking through a mouth stuffed with grass, but his irritation came through clearly enough. It swiftly quieted the grumblings from Galahad’s corner.

Though he’d only met Tristan a few days before and had never particularly liked Galahad, Lancelot nevertheless felt a surprisingly strong surge of relief at knowing they were still alive. He remembered—it hurt to go back and think of the chaotic raging massacre—he remembered Gawain had been beside him till the end, and he hadn’t seen Dagonet fall, either. He remembered fighting until he could only crawl, and then crawling over crimson mud that had smelled—the foul scent still seemed to cling to him.

But they were alive. Some of them. And…Arthur. The Roman garrison, of all people, saving them. It was so unbelievable that Lancelot suddenly suspected he was only dreaming, still trapped under that broken wagon with someone’s severed hand pressing against his cheek. He twisted around, but the pain wasn’t convincing enough, so he tried to sit up and look around.

The hands were back, and not gentle at all as they pushed him back down. “Stop moving or you’ll rip the stitches.”

“And since Merlin’s out with the scouts, you’d have to put up with her stitching,” commented a voice like a storm rumble. Lancelot found himself going limp, asked himself why, and only then did he recognize the voice as Arthur’s. So he hadn’t dreamed that.

“I’m not that bad,” the woman growled. The mattress bounced a little as she got off, yanking Lancelot into another pained half-curl.

Chuckling, Arthur slid a hand beneath Lancelot’s chin and lifted it. It was anyone’s guess what he was staring at; Lancelot’s eyes were mostly glued shut by crusts of something, but he knew perfectly well that all that throbbing pain in his face couldn’t equal a pretty picture.

Water dripping. Then a cool wet cloth, gingerly wiping over his eyes and brushing tantalizing moisture against his parched lips. He eagerly sucked in as much cloth as he could, using both tongue and teeth to squeeze as much water as he could from it.

“Guinevere, pour me some water, please.” Arthur waited till Lancelot was done with his noisy slurping, then redipped the cloth and finished cleaning off his face.

Thankfully, the room was dark so Lancelot didn’t have to worry about getting himself blinded. It still ached a little to see again, but the shadows and dull colors softly glided over his eyes, so adjustment only took a few seconds. Then he could have a proper look at everything.

Large stone room, so they must have been within the heart of the garrison. It was sparsely furnished, but what was there was of the best materials, both imported and local. A half-drawn curtain divided it into two parts, and the end they were in was crammed rather closely with cots containing the few wounded: Tristan and Galahad, Gawain slumped in the bed next to him, and Dagonet beneath the shuttered window. There might have been more elsewhere, but somehow Lancelot had a feeling that he was looking at all that was left of the Sarmatian leadership.

Guinevere turned out to be the intense, beautiful woman that was famous for being able to raid just as well as any Sarmatian. Up close, she turned out to be rather younger than was commonly assumed, but her looks certainly hadn’t been exaggerated. Even with the flattening effect of her light armor, he could detect the faintest promise of some very nice curves. Probably more important, however, was the hint of dissatisfaction behind her calm mask of a face. It disappeared whenever she looked at Arthur, but flared up whenever she glanced at the Sarmatians.

Arthur was tall and much swarthier than the few other Romans Lancelot had met, so it was easy to believe that he was, as rumor had had it, half-Sarmatian himself. It was actually rather easy to look on him, period; he certainly wasn’t anything like the demonic, maliciously intelligent monster of the campfire stories. In fact, as he gazed into the cup Guinevere had handed him, he resembled more an amused elder watching a skylarking boy come to grief than the most successful military commander ever sent to Sarmatia. Though of course he was far more appealing than the elders Lancelot had met. “This isn’t water.”

“No, it’s _herbs_ in water. Merlin fed you the same thing when you caught that fever.” Guinevere folded her arms over her chest and silently matched gazes with Arthur. Something almost visibly trembled the air between them.

Then Arthur turned back to Lancelot, finally removing his hand from Lancelot’s chin. A pity, because it was warm and had provided some support for Lancelot’s heavy head. The cup that was pushed against his lips wasn’t much of a substitute, given the sour smell of its contents. “Hold your breath and drink quickly,” Arthur advised.

As it looked like the man was prepared to stand there and wait till the world crumbled, Lancelot reluctantly did as he was told. A moment later, he enthusiastically tried to cough the awful stuff back onto Arthur and nearly tumbled himself off the bed. His head banged into Arthur’s shoulder, setting his mind into a nauseatingly crazy spin, and his bandaged hands wildly groped for handholds. “What the fuck was in that?”

“You don’t want to know.” Arthur calmly grabbed him by the waist, cradled him, and levered him back onto the bed. The other man started to let go, but Lancelot’s balance was by no means recovered and he hurriedly pulled Arthur back.

The slight smile on Guinevere’s face wasn’t pleasant in the least as she regarded the other knights. Then she casually retrieved the mug from Arthur and poured out another dose. “You’ll all have to drink it. Except for…what was his name?”

“Bors.” With a sigh, Arthur sat down on the edge of the bed and let Lancelot lean against him. “The luckiest one of you. He was knocked out early and covered by so many bodies that they took him for dead. As soon as we got him back here, he was up and about, yelling for wine.”

Gawain snickered and slowly rolled over, hissing a little whenever he jarred something. The corners of his smile were strained, but the humor in it was genuine enough. “Figures.”

“So are we the only ones you found?” Lancelot asked, desperately hoping that his guess was wrong.

Arthur looked down at him, the laughter in those eyes slowly tarnishing to what appeared to be real sympathy. With the wisdom of the soldier, the other man didn’t attempt to add false softness to his words. “All of you and Bors…yes. You’re the only ones we could save.”

“Better drink up,” Guinevere said as she moved toward a wary Tristan. “You’re not going to have much time to heal.”

“No. We’ve got tribes to inherit.” That wasn’t strictly true in Lancelot’s case, but it was close enough. He closed his eyes and tried to pretend that the feeling of leaden responsibility veining his shoulders wasn’t unwelcome. “And parents to grieve.”

He wouldn’t weep. He swore that he wouldn’t weep. The most any warrior could ask for was to die fighting, and while it’d been a bitter, hateful ambush, at least the family members that had fallen in it had done so with their faces to the enemy.

No one said anything in reply—like him, the other knights were now parentless as well—but Arthur quietly slid a hand down the length of Lancelot’s back and the gesture provided a strangely satisfying comfort.

“When you’re up to it, we need to know what the Goths were planning,” Arthur eventually murmured, gently setting Lancelot back on the bed. He sounded apologetic about mentioning it, but his voice was also too firm to be put off.

“We can tell you that now,” Tristan said. Galahad twisted around to glare at him, but they both knew the Romans were desperately needed allies now. “Though it’s not going to be much.”

Sputtering down his cup of medicine, Gawain nodded. “We’re all younger sons. They kept us outside.”

“Whatever you know is something I don’t, but might need to. It’ll be at least a month before any of the other garrisons could make it here.” Arthur leaned back and favored them all with a smile that was as full of self-deprecation as of sardonic knowledge. “Unfortunately, I’m all you have to work with.”

Tristan and Gawain both looked an inquiry at Lancelot, who shrugged in resignation and tried to get himself into a comfortable position. It was going to be a long recounting.

* * *

The bed sagged in the middle, Galahad hurt more than he ever had in his life, and he needed to piss. All of that was simply the unfairness of life, but the presence of Tristan on the side of the cot that was facing the room made Galahad think that someone somewhere was making fun of him.

Behind that ragged tangle of hair, one eye snapped open. “What?”

Galahad told himself that it was a perfectly good reason for disturbing the annoying, eerily aware bastard, but he still blushed as he whispered. “I need to piss.”

Tristan closed his eye, a flash of aggravation passing over his face, and then he raked the hair out of his face so he could glare out of both eyes. It took a lot of painful, awkward, elbow-jabbing cooperation, but they managed to sit up. “They should have put you with Gawain.”

“What about me?” The named man was crumpled up in one corner of his mattress, back braced against the wall as he tried to slowly stretch one leg.

“What are you two doing?” Lancelot hissed, so rumpled into the blankets that only his nose was visible.

Too busy trying to find some kind of usable container, Galahad didn’t answer. Apparently, Tristan took that as a sign that he should. “Making sure Galahad doesn’t wet the bed. Gawain should be doing it; he helped raise the most siblings.”

If Galahad hadn’t been in such a hurry, he would’ve crammed the blanket down the other man’s throat. “You fucking son of a bitch, that isn’t funny.”

Lancelot just burrowed deeper into the blankets, while Dagonet groaned and flopped over, still unconscious. The change in position revealed the lip of what looked to be an empty jar at the head of Dagonet’s cot, so Galahad tried to swing his legs over the side of the bed and walk over to it.

His knees didn’t like the idea, and neither did his back or arm when he banged them on the way down. “Ow! Fuck!”

Tristan sighed, then carefully eased himself off the bed and slung Galahad’s arm over his shoulder. “All right, stand—no, weight against the cot frames. You lean against me, you’ll knock us both—”

His lips clamped down and went white. Confused, Galahad leaned in for a closer look, absently putting a hand on Tristan’s side for balance. He felt warm wetness and promptly stumbled back, panic rising in his throat. “Oh, shit. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s fine. You didn’t tear anything.” Calm again, Tristan was poking about the linen strips swaddling his chest. “Just a little bleeding.”

Galahad blew out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and slumped against Dagonet’s cot. Then he winced and abruptly sat down, holding his howling arm. The jar was right next to his leg, so he desultorily wrestled it over with his feet and got things over with. “This is such a mess,” he muttered. “Goths, Romans, Britons, Arthur…and I can’t even piss without collapsing.”

“Be happy that Bors isn’t here to comment on that.” With none of his characteristic grace, Tristan swayed them back onto their cot, then fell still. He didn’t even try to get their limbs untangled, and usually he was shy of touching anyone. “Do you think it would’ve been better to die?”

Startled, Galahad stared at the other man’s face, searching the bruises and the liquid darkness of Tristan’s eyes for the source of the bizarre question. He touched the double marks, distorted now by swollen flesh, that stretched across the man’s cheekbones. “Why are you asking that?”

Tristan lifted and dropped his shoulder, attempting and failing to regain the composure he’d abruptly tossed away. In the end, he ducked his head and buried it in the pillow, leaving Galahad to wallow in confusion. The bastard. As if there wasn’t enough to worry about.

“If this is about having to bend down to the Romans for help—it’s almost worse than watching my father get an ax in his skull. But—” Galahad tried not to strangle the words too much “—what else can we do?”

“We’re going to show the Goths that they can’t spill Sarmatian blood without losing ten times as much of their own,” Lancelot said, voice harder than Galahad had ever heard it. A slight tremble of suppressed rage was detectable, but by the time he spoke again, it’d been completely submerged. “If it takes the Romans, then it takes the Romans. Rome’s thousands of miles away and wouldn’t give a shit if we weren’t sitting near some of their wealthiest provinces, but the Goths are just over the horizon.”

And as much as it clawed at Galahad to admit it, the other man was right. It was better to tackle the near enemy before the far one. “Anyway, Arthur’s not really Roman. So it’s not quite as bad.”

At first, Galahad thought that Tristan was choking, but then the other man lifted his head to show that he was laughing. Quietly, but still laughing. He ran a hand over Galahad’s head, rocking it backwards, then returned his face to the pillow. “You’re…you’re…”

“I think he’s trying to compliment you,” Gawain said.

“I don’t care what he’s trying do. I just wish he’d shut up again,” Galahad snapped, wrapping his annoyance around him and turning over.

The room soon fell silent again, leaving Galahad with no distraction from the fact that he was in an excruciating amount of pain and that he needed to roll back. Except that meant dealing with Tristan again, and…Galahad set his jaw and shoved himself onto his other side. He was determined to keep his eyes squeezed shut until he fell asleep, but a fingertip grazing his cheek sent them flying open.

That strange sad light was back in Tristan’s eyes, and it seemed to be asking Galahad something he didn’t know how to answer. That he probably couldn’t have answered even if he was confused and…frightened, because they’d all collapsed in one landscape and woken in a completely different one where even Tristan wasn’t the same.

Of course he wasn’t, Galahad snorted at himself. His entire family had come up to the meeting and he was the only one left. And it suddenly hit Galahad, low and brutal in his belly so all the air swept from his lungs—they were all alone. Gawain’s brothers and sisters, his own sisters—and the Goths had been exceptionally cruel to the women who’d fought them.

“All dead.” The whisper was so soft that it took Galahad a moment to realize that it wasn’t a thought in his head, but Tristan speaking to him.

“They are.” But Galahad could twist and feel pain, as real as the breath hitting his face, and he could look inside and feel the vengeful hate burning hot, and he could reach out and feel the cuts on Tristan’s hand. “But we’re not.”

Tristan simply looked at him for a long time, unblinking and solemn and somehow…warm? At any rate, it made Galahad flush again, which reminded him of something else. “This still doesn’t mean I like you.”

“I know.” Then the other man closed his eyes and let his head sink into the pillow—but he was smiling a little. And he didn’t let go of Galahad’s hand.

After a moment, Galahad decided that that wasn’t so bad. He wouldn’t have ever done it before, but then again, it wasn’t before. It was after, and they still had to live.

* * *

“They didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know.”

Arthur kept his head bent to the maps and his fingers busy replotting positions.

“They’re all from conspicuously hostile tribes.”

Fortunately, it was still early enough in the spring so that the rivers were too high with newly-melted snow for any large-scale crossings. There had been a few nearby bridges that might still have been usable, but Merlin was seeing to those. Due to the shortage of manpower, Arthur couldn’t spare enough soldiers for a decent guard on them, so they might as well burn them and rebuild later. Of course, given the general scrubbiness of the steppes’ few trees, that would take a while.

“They’re not even anyone with reputations! All younger sons, probably barely known within their own tribes—how much influence do you think they have?”

It would be about three weeks before the Goths could mount a full-scale invasion. Arthur started to relax, then remembered that he was thinking in terms of a Roman army, which was the most efficient fighting force on earth. He tried to put himself in a Goth mindset.

Five weeks, then. Thirty days to scale up defenses, integrate the Sarmatian cavalry into the rest of the garrison’s forces, and to try and raise the other garrisons. Messengers had gone out at first light, but Arthur had the displeasure of knowing very well what his fellow garrison commandants were like. He hoped that the threat of the Goths would outweigh any personal considerations—or at least make the petty delays shorter than usual.

“Arthur! I’m speaking to you!”

“And I hear you perfectly well, Guinevere.” He also saw the maps and styluses rattle all over the desk as his fists slammed into it. “For God’s sake, what do you suggest we do? Throw them out, wounded as they are, and face an unfriendly land as well as invaders? What, Guinevere?”

His words fell into a chasm of silence, and their echoes rang hollow in his ears. Arthur clenched his hands around the edge of the desk and struggled to get himself under control, while beside him Guinevere seemed turned to ice. She was so still that it wasn’t long before Arthur started to think he’d imagined her presence, but he didn’t glance to check. If he looked at her face, and at what he knew it would hold, he wasn’t sure how he would react.

“That one. The one you put in your own bed. Lancelot.” Her voice was brittle as frostbitten grass, and every word seemed to splinter as it fell between them. “He seems to be the leader.”

“Does he.” Understandably. Even grieving and angry, too weak to sit up by himself, the man had a palpable charm.

Six inches from Arthur’s ever-whitening knuckles, Guinevere’s fingers slowly curled back into claws. Then they stretched out, but didn’t relax. “He was watching you.”

“He doesn’t trust me to keep my promises without some kind of incentive. It’s an old game, and none of us are unfamiliar with it.” It was an unkind jab, but at the moment, Arthur was feeling too thin and breaking to care. “Besides—”

“I’ve always known you liked men as well as women. It doesn’t matter to me; unlike your Church, we don’t think that’s a sin. But I thought I was more to you than just a woman.” She ground out the words in the tone she normally saved for soldiers caught deserting.

“Guinevere…” Arthur finally looked at her, and only then did he see the tears. He swallowed against the lump of guilt settling in his throat and took her hand, pulling her to him. She came so fast she nearly tripped over his feet and nestled beneath his chin, filling his nose with the scents of leather and steel, sweat and sweet hay that were trapped in her hair.

It only took a moment to take the pins from her bun, and then he could luxuriate in her long wealth of silk hair, running it through his fingers like water. She shivered against his, pushing closer so their armor clinked and jarred, almost catching for a second. Grinning, Arthur swiftly set about eliminating that problem, and in between kisses Guinevere did the same. They stole lip-presses and breath while they stripped each other; long years of hurried trysts had taught them exactly how much needed to fall to the floor before they could stumble into the wall, Arthur hungrily sucking at her delicate collarbone. He always marveled at how such a fine thing could support a cuirass or a chainmail shirt.

Her hands were anything but frail as they clawed past his clothes to skim and scratch and stroke over skin. She was the one that shoved him into the wall, pushing her knee between his as brazen as anything. He groaned and clutched at her shoulders, then turned them about so he could pin her to the desk.

“Bed’s other way.” Guinevere nibbled at his lips, teasing them before kissing him so deeply he could taste her all the way through himself. “You don’t want to ruin the maps.”

“Only ones we have,” he agreed, walking them towards her cot. As isolated as they were, there was no one to care whether or not they shared a bed out of wedlock, but Guinevere had wanted space and he’d seen no good reason not to give it to her. The request had stung a little, but Arthur could understand. Sometimes the wide emptiness of the steppes wasn’t big enough to distance one from cruel reality.

And sometimes even locking legs around backs of knees, rolling breasts free of their bindings, wrapping tongues messily around each other—sometimes even that wasn’t close enough. Arthur wished he could slow down and savor the wild-eyed glory in his arms, but the frenzy wouldn’t abate and he could only ride it as best he could.

Guinevere ripped her nails down his back, drawing hot pain through his clothes, then twisted free of her trousers and spread her knees. He was already down on her, moving his mouth over her neck and breasts, tasting the sweet flesh that was so rarely free like this, rounding in his hands and plumping rosy nipples against his mouth. 

Fingers grazed his hard cock, making him jump and swear. Giggling, Guinevere took exquisitely firm hold of him and urged him in. Her head lolled back when he started rocking their hips together, but her eyes remained unblinkingly on him, smoldering dark with a top sheen of odd moisture.

She gasped once, and he not at all, the old habits of caution too deeply ingrained in them to give way even to this. But a few moments later, having recovered a little, they murmured musical nothings to each other.

“Marry me,” he eventually whispered.

Guinevere buried her face in his neck and wrapped her arms around him so tightly that he could hardly breathe. “No.”

Every time the hurt doubled itself, but he couldn’t help asking any more than she could help answering. “Why not?”

“Because I’ll never convert to Christianity. Because I won’t force that division on any children.” She pressed a kiss to his forehead, then rolled out from under him and started to dress herself with shaking hands. “Because I’m going back to Britain. Are you?”

Arthur watched how the sinuous line of her spine curved and straightened as she moved. He wanted to run his knuckle, and then his tongue, down it. Instead, he sat up and began to retrieve the various pieces of clothing that he’d lost along the way to the bed. “Both my parents died there, ostracized to the last by their own people for loving each other. There’s nothing for me in that land.”

“There’d be me.” Guinevere’s voice was short, and by the looks of her expression, her temper was even shorter.

Well, so was Arthur. They’d had this argument so many times that he’d gone through resentment to numb acceptance and was now returning to resentment. “You were born here—you’ve never even seen Britain. How can you go back to a land you never left?”

“How can you find a home you never let yourself have to begin with?” she hissed back, snatching up her swordbelt. Before he could grab her arm, she was whirling out the door.

“Ah… _excuse_ me,” said a startled male voice from the hallway.

Guinevere’s footsteps halted. When she replied, her voice lashed venom all the way back to Arthur. “What are you doing up—oh. Men. Always being pigheaded.”

A moment later, a bemused Lancelot staggered into the doorway and slumped against the frame. “Marital troubles?”

“We’re not married.” Arthur tried to remember that killing a guest—and a seriously injured one at that—was not good hospitality. “You should be resting.”

“Probably.” Lancelot shifted his weight and went even paler, his lips so tightly pressed together that Arthur almost thought that he could see the outline of the man’s teeth. “It would be difficult to explain my being here to your soldiers. Better that we all stay out of sight.”

A flutter caught Arthur’s eye, and he turned around to cover up the maps, then to shuffle the scrolls and various other things on his desk to one side. His jaws seemed to have glued themselves together, forcing him to squeeze out the words. “You are not prisoners or hostages, therefore you are free to walk about as you wish. Within reason, given that this is a military outpost. If I thought that you could make it without collapsing, I would suggest you go visit your friend Bors, who is currently housed in the residence of a generous lady named Vanora.”

Even though Arthur had assembled the soldiers at dawn and explained the situation to them, Guinevere had still thought it better to keep all the Sarmatians bundled together. Merlin had agreed with Arthur that softening them up separately was more likely to ensure them some help, but the resulting argument had still been hot and furious. It was nearing dusk now, and she still hadn’t seemed to have fully come round.

“Is he?” Though he was obviously in great pain, Lancelot managed to sound arch. “You are determined to win us over, aren’t you?”

Arthur dragged his breathing out and counted to ten, then exhaled. When two repetitions didn’t see him any calmer, he simply gave up. “I think I should take you back before you faint on me.”

When he reached for the other man, Lancelot flinched away and hastily stumbled backwards; the effort cost too much and Lancelot’s knees gave out. Arthur barely caught him in time, but even then the other man refused to go quietly and continued to struggle, grunting every time some injury was jarred or strained. “I’ll be damned if I let you carry me again like a puling girl—”

“You’ll rip your stitches and bleed to death if you don’t stop,” Arthur snapped. He wrestled Lancelot against the door, then pinned the man’s hands to his chest and glared down the stubborn indignation in those eyes. “Be sensible. You’re badly hurt. You’ll have to fight soon, and to do that you need to rest and recover. Either you sacrifice a little of your pride or you ruin your health.”

Lancelot thumped his head once in accident against the door, twice in frustration. Then he snarled and slumped into Arthur’s arms, still stiff with umbrage. “I hate this,” he muttered into Arthur’s neck. “Only a—what, a day since the massacre?—and those Goths are going around thinking Sarmatia’s spread-legged for the taking, while I have to lie down for a little nap.”

Youth and its drama, Arthur snorted to himself. But he hadn’t grown too far from that kind of restlessness himself, and so he didn’t comment. Instead, he simply bent down, slid his arm behind Lancelot’s knees and had the other man up before Lancelot was even done gasping in surprise. 

They were halfway back to Arthur’s rooms when Lancelot finally surrendered to the inevitable and relaxed. He even managed a bit of a grin; apparently, his nature was one of those that took refuge in sarcasm. “Well done, Arthur. You have the reflexes of a fighter, anyway.”

And the same backhanded way of delivering compliments as Guinevere did. No wonder she didn’t like him, considering how…irritating she could be on occasion. Still, Arthur needed her, both in the field and in his life. He resigned himself to a long session of placating her later in the evening and started planning out what he was going to say. “I’ve been around cavalrymen and other soldiers since I was born.”

“Right, your father.” Lancelot rubbed his nose along Arthur’s cheek, startling Arthur into jerking, but upon second look he only seemed to be settling his head on Arthur’s shoulder. “I suppose he had a name?”

“Uther.” The objections Guinevere had to the new alliance with the Sarmatians were going to be a sticking-point no matter how Arthur tackled them, but she was a fine strategist and politician herself and she had to have seen that neither side had any choice now. In that respect, they were secure. In other respects…her worries about the trustworthiness of their new allies did have merit. The presence of the Goths may have outweighed that of Rome, but the Sarmatians had spent far longer hating the legions.

Soft whuffle of breath against Arthur’s ear, ghosting a chuckle past. “And does he have a last name that isn’t Roman?”

“Why the sudden interest?” Arthur glanced at the other man and just glimpsed a curious spark of speculation in Lancelot’s eyes.

It vanished as soon as he saw it, and Lancelot shifted his head so Arthur could only see the black stubble of cheek and jaw. “I’m merely wondering what kind of Sarmatian would settle down and raise a son in a foreign land. You probably have relatives here still.”

“I doubt that. My line was already dying out when my great-grandfather was conscripted and sent off to Britain.” Interestingly enough, Arthur thought he saw a trace of disappointment flicker across Lancelot’s face. He considered the matter a little more, trying to see what possible ramifications revealing this bit of information might have, and ultimately decided that it wasn’t significant enough to affect the current situation. “Uther Pendragon.”

“I’m sorry—say that again?” Lancelot roused, blinking in surprise. “Pendragon? I’ve only heard of that one in old tales by the fires.”

As he stepped into his rooms, Arthur smiled a little to cover up the whisper of loneliness that went through him at Lancelot’s words. He’d always suspected as much, and he had thought that he’d grown used to being without blood-relations. Sometimes, when Guinevere was sleeping with her head pillowed on his arm, he’d thought that he’d even managed to find himself something better. “I did tell you. Now, I’d greatly appreciate it if you stayed in bed.”

Lancelot slid out of Arthur’s arms with considerably more reluctance than he’d gone into them, and Arthur belatedly remembered the earlier exchange with Guinevere. Then he dismissed her warning; the man was spectacularly good-looking beneath the bruises and rather appealing in an insolent way, but he didn’t come near to touching anything beneath the surface. After so long living with no roots, Arthur was desperate for something steady and lasting.

* * *

After Arthur had left, Tristan carefully untangled himself from the sleeping Galahad and worked himself to where he could see Lancelot’s face, which was full of emotions as he stared at the door. Confusion and consideration were most predominant, but there was a good helping of wistfulness and, unsurprisingly given Lancelot’s reputation, lust.

Gawain also was watching Lancelot, though he was mostly preoccupied with finishing off the meal they’d been brought while Lancelot had gone staggering around. “You know, there’s food.”

“Hmm?” Lancelot finally looked away from the door and thus spotted his share of bread, meat and wine. It didn’t take long for him to recall his bodily needs and he fell upon the food with gusto. “So, Dagonet up yet?”

“For a moment. Then he went back to sleep once he heard Bors was all right.” A last bit of bread popped into Gawain’s mouth and was vigorously chewed before he gulped it down with some wine. “Speaking of, did you see Bors?”

Shaking his head, Lancelot wiped at his mouth and then licked off the bits of bread. “No. But Arthur’s apparently put him with a nice lady named Vanora, so he shouldn’t be too hard to find. Just follow the sound of a grown man being whipped by a bitchy woman.”

Gawain was unwisely taking a sip just then and the joke immediately sent him into wild sputtering. He nearly spilled the rest of his wine before recovering his breath.

“And you believe him?” Tristan asked, deeming it time they turned toward serious discussion.

Lancelot gave him a sharp glance, then a minute nod in agreement. “I’ve no reason not to. He doesn’t strike me as that kind of man. Still…odd. Cross on his wall, so he’s one of those Christians, yet he lives in unmarried sin with Guinevere.”

“She’s one to watch, and not only for her medicine,” Gawain muttered, tossing back the rest of his wine. He set the cup by the side of the bed, then straightened up, hands instantly clutching at his sides as he winced. “Damn. We couldn’t defend ourselves against a…Tristan? What’s that noise?”

It was a strange, high cry that whistled at the end, something like the affection-call of the hawk Tristan had had. The hawk that had been slashed from his arm as he’d tried to free her—he shook away the memory and concentrated on the present. “Galahad…has an interesting snore.”

As he spoke, the other man rolled over onto his back, head thudding against Tristan’s hip. Eyes fluttered open to disclose their customary irritation, then squeezed shut. “What now? I was in the middle of a good dream.”

“Having your balls crushed and singing like a bird?” Lancelot offered. Snickering, he mock-cringed at the glower Galahad threw his way, but he soon sobered up and returned to Arthur. “So I think it’s safe to say that while the Goths are here, the truce will hold. As long as we manage to hold up our end. I have a feeling that while Arthur wouldn’t renege on a promise even if he was only left with us, Guinevere would be more than happy to toss us to the wolves.”

“And it’s too late for you to get on her good side,” Tristan observed, remembering the way she had eyed Lancelot when she’d left. He’d seen mother bears look less fierce when their cubs were threatened. “How much influence do you think she has with Arthur?”

Lancelot grimaced and jabbed a finger through a piece of bread, then held up his hand. He looked at it, then at Tristan and Gawain. “Enough. I don’t think she rules him, or he her, but they’ve got…something formidable.”

His face momentarily darkened and hardened, betraying the flourishing sprouts of antagonism, and he tore at the bread like a ravenous wolf at a carcass. “But Arthur’s vulnerable, and I’d bet my horse she knows it.”

Tristan wondered to what kind of weakness Lancelot was referring, and exactly what kind of interest the other man had in it, because Lancelot didn’t strike him as the kind of man that would do something purely for survival. Too much pride, and some cherished honor in there. And that trace of wistfulness when he looked at Arthur had nothing in common with the trading of favors of any kind.

“You don’t have a horse now,” Galahad muttered. “Fuck. We need to send messages soon to the tribes.”

“Messages, yes, but…I don’t think we should tell them everything until they get here.” Lancelot’s brow furrowed as he thought, and the rate of his speech slowed. “For one, we’d have to borrow messengers from Arthur, and he’s still Roman-trained, whatever else he is. Two…it might be hard to swing people around to us. They’ll want to fight the Goths, no doubt about that, but if we get bogged down in succession disputes, we might as well cut our own throats.”

About what Tristan had expected, but both Gawain and Galahad bolted upright and stared at Lancelot. The latter’s movement brutally shook the bed and nearly caused Tristan to black out; disoriented by the sudden fading of vision, he teetered forward and then flailed for a touchstone, taken by a shockingly strong sense of panic. It was too dark, and he couldn’t see again, just like during the ambush. He couldn’t see, and he depended on his eyes to tell him so _much_ \--

\--“Tristan! Tristan!” Fingers slapped around his wrists and pulled them together, forcing him to fall against a warm body. A pale, worried face swam into view at an excruciatingly slow pace, and then the rest of the world followed. Galahad sighed, attempting to look exasperated. “Would you stop turning white like that? I keep thinking you’re about to die, and some day that’ll be true and I’ll figure it’s just you fainting again.”

“I need to get outside,” Tristan muttered, ignoring the sally. His stomach was still queasy from the abrupt plunge back into the nightmare, so he grabbed Galahad’s hands and remained leaning against the other man’s solidity. “I need to get outside and track some of those Goths so I can kill them.” 

He bit his lip, uncomfortably aware that Galahad was probably the wrong person to be telling this, but not being able to move away for fear that his head would start to spin again. Everything around them was so uncertain, and he could barely even begin to figure out the meanings of all the new signs and traces that surrounded him. In fact, it was so different that they all seemed to have been taken out of the world and suspended in some in-between space where Lancelot was finally going past brief infatuations and Romans were saviors and Galahad was strangely kind. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice anything.”

“The…them betraying us at the meeting?” Galahad tentatively guessed. “No one had a clue, Tristan. No one.”

“But I should have.” Tristan closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath, feeling his way back to calmness. The hand that coasted over his back helped a little to ground him; he pressed into it, and it did another pass down his spine, applying a little more pressure.

Galahad strangled a laugh in his nervousness. “You should have a wagging tail.”

“You should be muzzled and leashed. Then you wouldn’t get yourself into so much trouble.” When an inch of space between them didn’t lead to anything untoward, Tristan let go of Galahad’s hands and shuffled the rest of the way back. He pretended he didn’t see Gawain grinning behind a hand, or Lancelot not even bothering to hide his amusement. “Bors, Dagonet and I should be fine.”

“And I shouldn’t have trouble, either. The one sister that stayed home likes me; she’ll help.” Hunching his shoulders, Galahad scowled and dared anyone to make a comment on that.

Smile fading away, Gawain sighed and laid back on his cot. “I might have a problem. If I’m well by the time they make it up here, it should be easy enough to handle.”

“I…” Lancelot had long since finished eating, and now he fiddled with his plate and cup before abruptly rattling them onto a nearby shelf. Then he looked away, presenting a perfect profile to Tristan, which came complete with working jaw muscle. “Arthur’s a Pendragon.”

Tristan blinked. “Does he have Excalibur?”

“I don’t know. But if he does…” The other man scrunched his knees to his chest, tapping his fingers against his lips. His expression closed in on itself, revealing nothing except the fact that Lancelot was seriously unsettled. “If he does, it’s going to be messy.”

“Well, that fits in with the way everything else has been going,” Galahad snarled, flopping down and curling up. Then he lifted his head, sullenly apologetic. “Sorry.”

The occasional flash of insight aside, he was still an inconsiderate, hot-tempered brat, so Tristan felt fully justified in cuffing him. “Stop. Moving. The. Bed.”

“I said I was sorry!” Injured air firmly in place, Galahad burrowed away from Tristan and sulked in a little heap of blankets.

“Look, we can’t do anything about Arthur until we know for sure,” Gawain interrupted, grim but thinking. “First things first. We’ve got to figure out what those messages are going to say.”

And that was a business none of them were looking forward to tackling, but he was right. With a collective sigh, they got to work.

* * *

“We look secure enough for the moment, but some of the tribes are beginning to stir. Soon they’ll be riding out to the meeting-place, and you and I both know how little it would take to uncover the massacre remains.” Merlin winced ever-so-slightly as he dismounted, probably from a combination of age and spending the entire day on horseback. As he commanded the infantry, and preferred to walk whenever possible, he wasn’t as accustomed to long hours in the saddle as Guinevere.

She nodded and helped him deal with his horse’s tack. “I know. The knights asked an hour ago for some messengers, and I’ve already sent those off on the fastest horses we have.”

“So we can expect a Sarmatian invasion to begin within the week.” Though his tone was joking, Merlin’s face was not. He swung his saddlebags over a convenient pole and started attending to his exhausted horse. “Given the distance, the last of them will be arriving barely before the Goths do. It’s fortunate that the Roman army makes it a practice to scavenge weapons and armor from the dead and thus our armories and full to bulging, because I doubt we can assume the Sarmatians are all equally well-equipped.”

He went on for some time in that vein, discussing how to most effectively combine their forces with the fierce but undisciplined Sarmatian cavalry. Or he at least tried to discuss those details, but Guinevere was still preoccupied with her and Arthur’s fight, and so she barely heard Merlin.

“…and then we’ll call in the Parthian cataphracts.”

“What? The nearest cataphracts are thousands of miles—” Guinevere ruefully cut herself off and gave Merlin her best apologetic smile. “I’m a little distracted.”

He regarded her for a long, silent moment, his gaze seeming to peel her layer by layer. Then he led his horse into its stall and retrieved the staff that he carried everywhere with him from a corner. “This is not about the Sarmatians.”

“No. I agree that we need them. I don’t like it, but nevertheless, I agree with it. And I’m going to make this plan work if I have to whore for it.” She lifted her chin and fixed him with her own stare, doing her best to emulate that disquieting sense of knowledge that he always seemed to have.

“This is about Arthur.” Merlin cast Guinevere a last, almost sympathetic look before striding out of the stables.

She hurried after him, inanely noting how his usual flowing grace had been bent considerably by the day’s riding. It would have been funny if she had felt confident enough to laugh around Merlin, whose self-possession was so quietly complete in itself that it was more intimidating than a broadsword swinging at her head. After all, she could always duck a sword. She could never duck Merlin’s comments.

“He asked me to marry him again.” Guinevere twisted her hands together, feeling her knuckles lock, strain and then slide free only to lock again. “And I told him no. Then…what we said to each other…I don’t think he’ll ask again.”

“The first time we had this discussion, you never gave me a satisfactory answer for why you said no. And you’ve never corrected that.” Merlin’s tone wasn’t judging, merely curious. That was possibly worse, because that meant he already knew things were decided and thus wasn’t going to expend energy on trying to alter the inevitable.

Well, she didn’t yet know what she was going to do, so there was still chance, if not hope. “His church would want him to convert me.”

“You know he’s long since broken free of strict dogma.” As they walked, Merlin tapped the end of his staff on the ground, sometimes beside them and sometimes crossing their legs to mark out the path ahead of them. It was several minutes before Guinevere noticed that he was subtly using his stick to direct their meanderings.

“He…it’s that Pelagius writer, and those essays he’d written that Arthur treasures so much.” Even as she spat out her words, she knew that Merlin wasn’t going to believe that, either. She sucked in her breath and clenched her fists, struggling to come to terms with the truth she’d found in Arthur. “No, it’s not that. Though I don’t think Pelagius’ ideas about everyone being born completely free helped.”

They were roughly heading for Arthur’s rooms, but Merlin occasionally sent them on a detour to stretch out their walk. He did so quietly and surreptitiously, which was just one facet of his superb judgment that Guinevere had always admired. Merlin could be as bullheaded as Arthur on certain points, but in all the years she had known him, he had never lost his temper or said anything in haste. Whatever words passed his lips did so only after careful consideration.

Which was a talent that she didn’t yet have, she mused to herself. Arthur was better at it than her, but even he sometimes lost control of himself and revealed that after so much time together, they still had secrets from each other. “I’ve never seen Britain’s green forests, but I still feel them deep inside. So deep that I can’t imagine being without it. And he was born there, and he just—it’s like there’s an entire part of me that he doesn’t love and doesn’t _want_ to love.”

“Sarmatia is in his blood as well, yet you don’t seem to care for it.” Merlin was speaking as politely as he could, but his words still rankled.

“There’s no need,” she mumbled. It chilled fast here, and evening was well underway. Shivering, Guinevere bundled her cloak more closely around herself. “He doesn’t care for Sarmatia any more than he does Britain. He’s _free_ of any such attachments.”

A dying beam of light glanced off Merlin’s eye as he turned to look at her, briefly filling it with gold. For a moment, Guinevere saw a vision of a one-eyed god, watching the world through the lenses of false value and true. “He left Britain. He came here.”

“And he’s for Rome once he’s allowed to finish his term of service.” Guinevere asked, awkwardly changing the subject. “They’ve already extended it once because he’s so good and because they can’t get anyone else to stay here, but they can’t keep him here forever. When he speaks of Rome, he looks almost content. But he still doesn’t feel for it the way I feel for Britain, heart-deep inside. So why not consider our country instead?”

“That is a question you should ask Arthur.” Merlin made no apologies for his unhelpfulness, which she resented even though it was one, fair payback for her dodging him, and two, a sensible attitude.

The staff suddenly flicked up before her, bringing them to an abrupt halt. They were still a few hundred yards from the outside wall of Arthur’s rooms, atop a slight incline, and so they had a perfect view of Arthur rounding the corner of the building. And of one shutter slowly swinging open to reveal Lancelot, who was also watching Arthur walk stoop-shouldered with exhaustion through the thickening dark. He’d probably been straining his eyes through the shutter cracks, waiting for the right moment; Guinevere had done that, once upon a distant time.

“I’ve loved Arthur since I was twelve,” she suddenly said, confessions welling up in her throat like a newly-tapped spring roaring out. “It took till I was sixteen before he finally thought of me as a woman. We’ve only had two years.”

“And he loves you,” Merlin agreed. “But people can hate each other and live side by side, and they can love without ever being able to bear each other’s presence.”

Guinevere spun on her heel and glowered at him, furious at his continuing calmness. She wondered whether the old bastard had ever felt a moment of passion in his life, or if he’d always been so untouchable. She thought about whether she was jealous of that. “So what are you saying? I should leave him because I love him?”

“I am saying that you should make up your mind what your love can take, and soon.” Unfazed by her snarled accusations, Merlin tucked his staff beneath his arm and brushed an insect off his cloak. “If what you have isn’t enough, then no amount of wishing will make it so. And—Guinevere, you know how difficult things are going to be soon. If this is going to drive you and Arthur further apart, you need to deal with it now, while we have time.”

“Guinevere? Merlin?” Arthur had spotted them, and was already halfway to them. He was smiling, but the corners of his mouth kept drawing down and then jerking back up, showing better than anything else how uncertain he was of his welcome.

In her peripheral vision, she could see the shutter swinging shut. Arrogant son of a whore—barely a day, and he thought he had a shot. Guinevere was almost tempted to stay with Arthur just to spite the bastard.

That thought, properly assimilated, made her heart sink and her belly turn to ice. So. She had decided, after all.

“Merlin—” Arthur began, but the other man raised a hand.

“Everything went as planned. The nearest tribes are stirring a little, but Guinevere says she’s already sent messengers on behalf of our guest knights. Otherwise, nothing of note to report.” Merlin nodded once, then glanced at Guinevere.

Her knees were threatening to give way and her mouth was dry as a desert, but Guinevere had never run from a confrontation before, and she didn’t intend to start now, no matter how much she wished to. “Arthur, if you don’t have anything urgent to say to Merlin, I’d like to speak to you for a moment.”

“If he doesn’t say that he has anything remarkable to mention, then I suppose a full report can wait till morning,” Arthur replied, tone as mild as his gaze on Guinevere was intense. “Go on and rest, Merlin.”

“Gladly. I still prefer to leave the horses to you two.” The other man gave them both another nod, then swiftly walked away.

In the end, Guinevere couldn’t look at Arthur and speak; she dropped her head and stared at his boots. “I’m never going to marry you.”

Arthur sucked in a breath, then turned so still that she thought he had petrified. A quick peek told her differently, for if his eyes were any kind of guide, fire was the closest element.

“All right,” he finally said.

“I…just listen to me, and don’t interrupt. I see you risk your life almost every day, throwing yourself at warriors, politicians—panicking horses, even. And you do it for…for principles. Because you think it’s your duty, but—but damn it, Arthur. I can’t vow myself to you, under any religion, and know that you’re still going to leave me no matter what.”

Guinevere waited for him to speak, but he must have thought that she still wanted him silent. Or maybe he was simply trying to control himself, not wanting to hurt her. It would’ve been easier if he hadn’t.

“In seven years, I’m going to Britain,” she continued. “I’m going. Would you go with me?”

He was quiet for a long, long time. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded as if it’d aged a thousand years. “I hate that land. It took both my parents from me—my father in warfare, and my mother during a raid on our estate. They burned her alive.”

“Some of them might be my kin.” Her hands itched to touch him, but she held herself back, determined to not make it any harder than it already was for them. “Is Rome so much better?”

“For me it is. Guinevere, why now? Why not wait until you’ve at least seen Rome, or at least till we’re past this campaign? There’s so much going on--”

She lifted her hand and he fell silent. Then she could feel heat radiating in the same shape: he was holding his hand a hairsbreadth from hers, curling his fingers so they almost touched the tops of hers.

“Because I’ve waited for you for eight years, but I’ve waited for Britain for my entire life. This isn’t something we can put off, and we both know it,” Guinevere whispered.

The heat-shadow snatched itself away. Arthur stalked off a few paces, shoulders heaving with suppressed frustration, and then he whipped back. “If this is because of that damned Sarmatian—my God, Guinevere. I thought you knew me better than that. I thought you _knew_ me.”

“It’s not about him unless you make it about him.” Before she knew quite what she was doing, she had grabbed him by the face and yanked him down. “Arthur, I love you. But I can’t be your Roman wife. I’m a _Briton_ , and I always will be. I’ll go to you for almost anything, but with this—with this you have to come to me. I’m sorry. I—it’s part of me.”

He tore away from her, raising his hand to his cheek as if her touch had burned him. The feel of his skin certainly had scorched her palms, and it hurt so much that she knew she’d carry the scars to the end of her days.

Arthur’s voice was low, flat, and as punishing as the mountains that surrounded. “In Britain I was the half-breed that never fit anywhere. Here, I’m the Roman in the wilderness. Only in Rome did anyone look past what I _was_ to who I was. If you want me to set you free, Guinevere, I’ll gladly do it. I’d be a sorry hypocrite if I did otherwise. But if you want me to pretend to be what I cannot, then I have to refuse.”

“Then we don’t have anything else to say to each other, do we?” Guinevere hugged herself, curling away from the cold. She was so chilled that anger was beginning to boil in her veins in self-defense. “Have I ever asked you for much, Arthur? Did I criticize your religion? Did I ever break with you in public? Did I ever blame you for upholding the very Empire that ripped my people from their homeland? Did I?”

“No.” Now Arthur was staring at her with desperately sad eyes, all his earlier fury swiftly draining away. “No. But I could have understood you doing that. I could have lived with it. What you’re asking now is for me to turn my back on everything that I am, and I cannot.”

The night wind bit like a thousand tiny rats, leaving every inch of Guinevere raw. “Then good evening. And…” she swallowed against the contrary surge of tenderness, but let the sincerity pass on “…and a good life, wherever you end up.”

Before he could reply, she swung herself down the hill and walked quickly to her rooms. She managed to prepare for sleep and climb into bed without feeling much more than a certain numbness, but in the morning, her pillow was damp.


	3. Chapter 3

Bors absently picked at his teeth, then wiped the spit-soaked fragment on the rail. “Nice one, all right. Vanora’s got spirit and sense.”

“And she leaves marks.” Galahad carefully rolled onto his belly and rested his chin on his less injured arm. True to his words to Lancelot, Arthur had allowed them to go almost anywhere they pleased within the garrison once the healers had decided they were fit enough. Consequently, they were now soaking up the weak sunshine in a field overlooking the paddocks where their promised horses were gamboling about, reveling in a freedom of movement that the knights didn’t yet have. “Neck, Bors.”

The other man frowned and reached up, then winced when he found the bite mark. But like a moonstruck fool, he was still grinning. “Spirit, did I say?”

“What do your people think?” Tristan was on his back beside Galahad, eyes mostly closed against the light. For the past few days, he’d been winding more and more tightly in on himself, almost to the point of talking entirely in annoyingly significant looks, and so it was a relief to see him acting more like himself.

“I’ve just met them coming in this morning!” Bors protested. When they all turned to look at him, he dropped his chin and mumbled something at his knees.

Propped up on his elbow, Lancelot stretched out and smacked Bors on the shoulder, then swore as he flapped his hand. “You’ve got stones in your damned…never mind. Bors. This is important. Do you or do you not have them with us?”

“They’re with us. They’re with us—there were a few grumbles, but it all went away when Arthur came down to speak with them.” Bors shrugged and resumed picking at his teeth, only this time he used a large knife. 

As the entire point of coming outside was to finally breathe fresh air and see attractive things, Galahad rolled over so he instead faced Tristan, who was far better-looking even if that went hand-in-hand with far more exasperating. The other man was staring at Bors’ knife with an odd kind of intensity, but when he noticed Galahad, he switched his gaze to the sky.

“Better man than I thought, Arthur,” Bors said in a pensive tone. “Offered hay and food and lodging, even though we’d brought our own.”

“He would have to,” Lancelot muttered, fiddling with the grass about six inches from Tristan’s head. He would pluck out the blades and then arrange them in lines that he constantly shifted about for no immediately discernable reason, yet his expression was of utmost concentration as he moved them. “Politics, politics—tcah! At least we don’t have to worry about your people. But then, you lot were always more about the fight than the sides.”

Something rumbled loudly enough to make them all glance at the clear sky. Then a slightly embarrassed Bors clapped a hand to his stomach and offered them an affable smile in lieu of apology. “Gotten used to some good cooking. Lancelot, someday someone’s going to whip you proper for your sarcasm, but—well, you’re right. Give us a battle and we’re happy. Besides, it’s not like the Britons are all that bad, once you get to know them.”

“Maybe I should stop round Vanora’s, then. Get to know yours.” Lasciviousness was inadequate to describe the kind of grin that bloomed on Lancelot’s face. He quickly ducked the cuff Bors sent his way, then pushed himself into a sitting position. “Anyway, I suppose you’re going to be sleeping with your tribe, now that they’re here.”

“Ah, well, my gear’ll be there. Sleeping, now…” Bors spread his hands, trying and failing to look innocent. “We’ll just see how the wind blows.”

An elbow nudged at Galahad’s ribs, calling his attention back to Tristan, who nodded at the paddocks. “Guinevere and Arthur are back.”

And they were, their horses sandwiching Dagonet, whose people had arrived just an hour before. He looked well enough, given how he’d been a mere week ago; livid half-healed cuts streaked his shaved head and his face was still unhealthily pale beneath its tan, but his seat in the saddle was loose and relaxed, and he didn’t flinch whenever his horse rocked him. Envy flared up in Galahad’s breast, so hot the corners of his eyes stung for a moment. “More good news, it looks like.”

Tristan gave him an odd look, but it was Gawain, just waking up, that commented. “What, you and Dagonet fall out over something? Sounds like you’d rather we were all in trouble.”

“No. I—” It was stupid and unfair, but even though Galahad knew it, he still couldn’t help but taste sourness. “I just want to get on a horse again.”

“Another week and you will.” Lancelot swung his legs around and used his elbows to crawl past Tristan’s other side, gaze intent on the figures below. “You will. Just in time to get wounded again, probably.”

Gawain rolled his eyes and threw a handful of grass at Lancelot. “I didn’t drag myself out here to listen to this. If you’re going to be like that, go inside and do it.”

Of course, everyone else was perfectly all right and it was only Galahad that wasn’t ever patient enough, or strong enough, or enough of anything else. He knew that he was only really good for fighting with sword and shield, and usually he was fine with that. Being good at anything else only seemed to bring trouble, else why would Bors find it so easy to be satisfied wherever he was, and Lancelot so hard?

Unfortunately, only being a fighter meant that when they were bed-bound like they were, forced to rely on the help of others for even the simplest of tasks, Galahad couldn’t distract himself with planning this or that. His hands itched for his sword, and he often woke dreaming of galloping over the steppes only to find himself imprisoned in a tangle of aches and ills.

“If this were easy for any of us, we’d spend our whole lives in bed.” Tristan spoke too quietly to be heard by any of the others, and when Galahad started in surprise, he grabbed Galahad’s shoulder and forced him to be still. “You can either heal well or heal fast; you can’t do both.”

“I _know_. Just…what am I supposed to do? Play with grass?” Galahad derisively flicked his fingers at Lancelot’s little designs. Then he blinked and took a second look.

The sun must have shifted, or maybe it was the distraction of Tristan jarring Galahad’s mind out of its black rut. At any rate, the patterns suddenly made sense.

“Not exactly playing. Though that maneuver with the left wing would take more cavalry than we probably will have.” Tristan wasn’t quite smirking, but the light in his eyes was definitely amused. He squeezed Galahad’s shoulder, then twisted around to watch Arthur, Guinevere and Dagonet discuss something as they dismounted by the stables.

Lancelot absentmindedly poked Tristan. “Don’t criticize my battle strategy unless you’ve got a better alternative.”

“I’m looking at it.” Though his voice was inflectionless and his words were innocent enough, Tristan nevertheless managed to convey quite a lot in his statement. Most of that went past Galahad and left him only with the sense that something had been there, but he understood enough to tense up and glance at Lancelot’s hands, which were suddenly clenched in the dirt.

Bors uncomfortably coughed. “Believe I’d best be going. Need to go see Dag, make sure the idiot’s not been straining himself.”

He walked off rather quicker than he strictly had to, leaving Lancelot staring fixedly at Arthur, Tristan calmly regarding Lancelot, and Gawain and Galahad silently asking each other who was going to pry Lancelot’s hands from Tristan’s throat.

In the end, Lancelot kept his temper and merely rolled his shoulders as if to relieve some strain there. He glanced at Tristan, face closed and hard, then returned his eyes to Arthur. The muscle in his cheek twitched twice—and then he abruptly slumped down, laughing a little. “No, I can’t see Arthur letting anyone but himself dictate the tactics for any battle involving his soldiers.”

“He and Guinevere don’t seem to be quite as close.” Tristan sounded as if he was discussing the best way to repair a bridle. “If you’re looking for that.”

And once Galahad started to, he could see that while those two seemed to be friendly enough, there was a certain strain in the way they acted around each other. Guinevere would stare at Arthur when he was turned away from her, and sometimes she would half-lift a hand to him, as if she wanted to say something. Meanwhile, Arthur stiffened ever-so-slightly whenever he had to face Guinevere as if bracing himself for a blow.

“Fascinating.” Lancelot drawled the word like the very sound of it bored him. He abruptly jerked himself onto his side and curled up, apparently asleep.

Galahad seized Tristan’s arm and dragged the other man away, almost irritated enough to dare shaking him. “Are you a complete idiot?” he hissed. “What the fuck are you trying to do?”

Gawain was staring, but he might as well. It was simple commonsense that they’d be stronger if they all stayed together and weaker if they divided themselves. And Lancelot was going to get the largest and most prominent tribe of them all; without any of the others, it’d be hard going, but without his people, it’d be a failure.

Of course, Tristan didn’t even react. “I’m pointing out an important fact. Arthur and Guinevere are drifting apart.”

“You’re saying it to Lancelot, and if he’s being stupid enough to think about what I think he’s thinking about…” Galahad stopped and tried to remember how the sentence had gone in his mind, where it’d made perfect sense. After a few moments of fruitless trying, he snarled and dropped his hold. “Oh, who cares what I think? You obviously don’t—Tristan, you could at least do that kind of thing when you’re where he can’t get at you.”

One thin eyebrow arched over a confused eye. “I’m capable of defending myself.”

“Not without at least a dagger, and I don’t see any of those on you.” And Galahad wanted to point out a few other things, like Lancelot being less injured, but he had a feeling Tristan already knew. The man was just…annoying. He knew exactly what he was doing and thus ended up being deliberately careless. Though why Galahad cared about that was slightly beyond him at the moment.

“If you two are done having your moment, I think I hear them coming to bring us in.” Amusement turning him lazy and slow, Lancelot rolled over and favored Galahad with a faint half-smile. “And I wouldn’t kill him, you know. Unlike you, he knows when to be quiet.”

The snarl was ready and willing in Galahad’s throat, but he was utterly torn as to which man deserved it more. In the end, he simply hid his head in his arms and growled at the grass.

“Lancelot. Shut up.” Tristan’s hand fluttered over Galahad’s shoulder, then settled around his elbow. It stayed there for a moment, fingers loosely wrapped around the joint, before tugging. “Come on.”

* * *

Guinevere was unbuckling her armor when she sensed him in the doorway. Her fingers stilled, then hurriedly started up again. The resulting snaps and clicks seemed to echo for far too long, cracking the silence that stained the air, but she couldn’t bring herself to do anything to interrupt them.

He could. He always could. If there was one accusation that could never be laid at Arthur’s feet, it was that of cowardice in speech. Even if the words he had to say were visibly shaving years off his life, he would still give them voice.

“So that’s two tribes with us.”

The sheer normality of the statement almost brought tears to her eyes, but she was too old for that now. She’d made her choice, and she’d done so with a clear head, so there was absolutely nothing she should regret. Besides, if she and he were going to continue winning battles, they had to put aside their private lives and act like the military officers they were. “Yes. I have to say, it’s been much easier than I thought it would be.”

“You trust them now?” He shifted his weight, making his cuirass creak and his cloak rustle.

Guinevere laid down the last piece of ceremonial armor, glad to have the useless stuff out of the way. Her body was sore and stiff from straining under its weight for half the day, but another half still remained and so she made herself start strapping on her everyday armor. “Again, not beyond this temporary truce. But then, they only ever promised to help us fight the Goths. I believe that. I don’t think they’ll change their minds.”

“Good. I’m going to the stables, and then I’ll be walking around the rest of the evening, seeing that everyone settles in.” Arthur hesitated, then took two steps away from her.

“When are you going to eat dinner?” she called, finally turning around. Their eyes met and the air in between shivered.

He was asking her again, even though she’d already given him her final answer. Asking with the dark softness of his eyes and the slight out-turning of his palms, as if they were waiting for the curves of her shoulders. “I’ll snatch a bite here and there,” Arthur replied, tone neutral.

“Where—” Guinevere had to lower her voice because the stress had tuned it to a near-shriek “—where are you sleeping now?”

The question had been nagging at her for days, but she hadn’t yet known where the new lines of their relationship fell. For the most part, she still didn’t know.

“In my rooms. I’ve had that small antechamber off the side cleared out, and a cot and desk moved in.” Arthur seemed as if he’d expected something else. That might have accounted for the wariness in his voice. Possibly.

On the other hand, by now even a fool would’ve noticed the way Lancelot always stared at Arthur. The thought of that—that Sarmatian already trying to take over put steel in Guinevere’s voice and bile in her throat. “The knights in the next room…they don’t disturb you?”

“No. They’re as cautious around me as I am around them.” Now Arthur was looking at her like he would a nervous horse, expecting to dodge any moment. “Guinevere…if you want me to wait, I will.”

“Waiting would imply that I’d change my mind, or that you would. I don’t think that that’ll happen with this.” She rushed the rest of her dressing, then slapped on her sword-belt and yanked the straps tight. “Don’t wait for me, Arthur. I’m not your Church. I don’t have the slightest bit of respect for martyrs.”

He nodded and stepped back to let her through, fists glued to his thighs as his eyes turned opaque. “I see that more than one thing has changed.”

“What, because now I’m saying what I think about your religion? I’ve always, always wanted to,” Guinevere snapped back, increasing her pace so she could stay abreast of her anger and not fall behind into regret.

“Then why didn’t you?” Arthur was still following her, and considering how close his voice was to a roar, his frustration was beginning to overcome his misery. Good, she thought. It was easier to ignore that than it was the silent sadness. “Has everything we’ve have been false? Did I ever love you, or am I in love in some fake you made up to please me?”

At that, she whirled about and slammed the heel of her hand into his shoulder, jarring him to a halt. “If you would fall in love with an illusion like that, then it’s me who should be asking that question! I’ve never pretended to be anything I wasn’t, Arthur. I’ve never known a single doubt about who I was, or where I came from. Can you say the same?”

When she fell silent, he didn’t take up the thread of accusation. Instead, his eyes turned from hot to cold to wintry, and the lines of his face deepened, all his fatigue coming to the forefront. “You’re lucky, Guinevere. You are and I—I envy you for that.”

“Don’t wait for what I can’t give,” she whispered. His hands were drifting near hers and she desperately wanted to feel them, callus-hardened and scar-ridged, against her own, but her fear kept back. It was so hard to be around Arthur and still remember that she was Guinevere, to remember that being sucked into him with only a lifeless shadow left behind was not what she wanted. “Don’t lay your guilt on my shoulders.”

He swallowed hard, his whole body leaning forward in readiness. So close she could smell nothing but him—and then he was stepping back and half-turning to let the chilling air pass. “It’s a hard thing to reach twenty-eight and still not know where you truly belong. I thought—for a while I thought it was with you. But I do know this: wherever I need to be, it’s not in Britain.”

“Arthur, I’ll never stop loving you—but I can’t help you with that.”

This time, Guinevere let him leave first.

* * *

Lancelot was almost convinced that pursuing Arthur was a bad idea. First of all, there were the complications of allegiances, and not just the wartime ones. Arthur had a Briton mother, a Sarmatian father, and a Roman name; he slept—or had slept, anyway—with a Briton woman, had lived in Sarmatia for the past ten years, and camp rumor had it that he was angling for retirement to Rome. Secondly, he was a Christian, albeit a very tolerant one. Thirdly, Guinevere had made her reputation in blood and graves, and to judge from the few exchanges Lancelot had had from her, she wasn’t oblivious to undercurrents in the least. Fourthly, Lancelot had only known the man for a week. He had bedded women and the occasional man that he’d met only moments before, but for some reason, Arthur was different.

When Lancelot looked at Arthur, he didn’t see hot twisting flesh, sweet sweaty burn and rumpled sheets—not first, anyway. First, he saw the long roll of years, spanning the horizons.

“Of course I do,” he muttered, rippling his fingers through a moonbeam that strayed past his bed. Arthur’s bed. “The Pendragons are a very, very old line.”

Fifth problem. Depending on how things turned out, he might end up having to go back to fighting Arthur or to swear eternal allegiance to the man. About a month ago, Lancelot would’ve slaughtered anyone that suggested the latter choice. Now, trying to think of Arthur as a possible enemy gave him nausea, which grew steadily worse as time went on.

It might have helped if Lancelot understood the _why_ behind it, but he didn’t. Yes, Arthur appeared to be genuinely honorable and generous and good, and yes, he was uncommonly handsome, and yes, even the most vindictive of the Rome-haters among the Sarmatians admitted that he was a worthy opponent on the battlefield. However, all of that should have inspired respect alone. It should not have led to this…this incredible _need_ just to watch him, as if seeing were the same as eating and Lancelot was a starving man.

Maybe it was the shock of the massacre, which certainly hadn’t left any of them unscathed. Dagonet hadn’t talked much before it, but now he was practically a mute. Previously almost as great a philanderer as Lancelot, Bors now spoke about Vanora like he had an eye to settling down. Gawain had nightmares, Galahad’s restlessness had turned bitter, and Tristan had those odd attacks where he would freeze for a moment, staring at nothing. So perhaps Lancelot’s sudden fascination with Arthur was the invisible scar that had been dealt to him.

Laughing softly to himself, Lancelot dismissed that thought as soon as it sprang to mind. No, if anything Arthur was the antidote. The salve or balm or what-have-you, because whenever Lancelot saw him, all the many pressing worries and gnawing remembered horrors simply fell away. For a moment or two.

Well, he wasn’t going to get any sleep like this. A quick glance around the room confirmed that the others were soundly slumbering—Tristan might be faking, but Lancelot had long since given up on trying to slip past him—so he swung himself off the bed, taking care both not to make any noise and not to overexert himself. The last thing he wanted was to have to be carried around again.

Then again, the crook of Arthur’s neck had smelled pleasantly of horseflesh, leather and salt…and at this rate, Lancelot was going to be forced down one particular path far earlier than he wanted. Shaking his head to dislodge the fancies from him, he ducked past the curtain partitioning the room and then staggered to a halt.

Blinking, Arthur looked back, a scroll dangling from his fingers and several thick books on the table before him. His eyes were bloodshot and ringed with the purplish bruising of fatigue, and his shoulders had the set of a far more beaten man. “Did you need something?”

“Ah…no, not really. I’m just having a problem sleeping, and I thought I would…sit up for a bit, or something.” Despite the presence of braziers, the coldness of the air nipped straight through the thin fabric of Lancelot’s shirt and made him shiver.

Arthur’s eyes darted to that, producing a brief burning sensation on Lancelot’s left side, and then the other man stood up to offer a fur. “You’re free to take the chair there, though if you’re looking for good company, I wouldn’t be the one to ask.”

Lancelot gratefully took the fur and used it to bundle himself into the chair beside Arthur. “Bad news? The Goths are early?”

The other man regarded him for a cool moment, apparently trying to divine what Lancelot’s motives were. For all Arthur’s uncommon integrity, he clearly had learned that most men didn’t have the same high internal morality. “No. But I think you’re intelligent enough to appreciate the complexities of running a garrison of this size.”

“And with the added difficulties of handling guests that were only lately enemies?” Though he wanted to provoke Arthur enough to get an unreserved answer, Lancelot didn’t want to start a serious quarrel. Consequently, he kept his tone light and his nuances delicate enough to be ignored, if Arthur wanted to take that path.

Arthur didn’t. He switched his scroll for the thickest of the books before and cracked open the tome, flipping rapidly through the pages with one hand while he absently fanned away dust with the other. “It is tricky, but as I don’t yet hear anything burning, I think things are going well.”

His expression didn’t change at all, which left Lancelot uncertain as to whether he’d just received an honest opinion or a joke. Or a test, if Arthur had also decided to probe.

In that case, Lancelot might as well treat it as a jest. He chuckled. “Oh, we don’t burn. We merely riddle with arrows, then ride in for the kill. No point in burning a perfectly good store of supplies.”

A few more pages flipped and Lancelot started to feel worry nibbling at him, but then he noticed the smile that was creeping onto Arthur’s face. The other man glanced at him, eyes sparking with good humor, and Lancelot nearly betrayed himself by sighing in relief. “Right. I forgot that this isn’t Britain.”

“That’s how they fight there? Destroying the loot that’s the whole reason behind most fighting? Rome doesn’t care how many soldiers she loses, but she counts every coin in her treasury.” The fur wasn’t long enough to stretch past Lancelot’s knee, so as a result, the lower half of his legs were slowly turning to ice. He thought for a moment about the childishness of the solution, then shrugged and slowly maneuvered himself till he could curl his legs on the chair. Even if that position probably made him look as if he were twelve, it did cover his legs. And put his head closer to Arthur’s shoulder so he had a decent view of the book. “Is that Latin?”

Arthur’s jaw clenched, then relaxed. He slid one fingertip up and down the well-worn margin, then stopped it by one phrase, which he underlined with his nail. Then he browsed on, searching for the next. “In Britain, enemies of Rome don’t raid for profit. They raid out of hatred.”

Sore spot, obviously. And ‘enemies of Rome’ was a curious way to put it. “You mean the Britons who don’t agree to Roman rule?”

“They’re called Woads. My soldiers are descended from a group of Woads that were exiled here after their rebellion was crushed.” Long eyelashes drooped down, almost as if Arthur was starting to doze off, but then they snapped up and a sharp gaze swept over Lancelot. “And yes, this is Latin. You…can you read it?”

“A couple words. It’s hard to avoid the language, even in the mountains. You Romans are persistent.” Lancelot ducked his head beneath Arthur’s look, feeling heat prickle in his cheeks. The red light from the braziers and the yellow from the sole candle Arthur was using painted everything in rich warm shades, so hopefully that would cover up the flush. “Though you tend to forget that other peoples can be just as determined.”

A laugh that was more of a sigh. Arthur considerately tilted the book so Lancelot could have a better view. “This is the Vulgate. The Latin translation of the Bible, which is—”

“—the holy book of the Christians, I know. Barbarism isn’t the same as ignorance.”

Again, Arthur seemed about to take offense, but at the last moment, he restrained himself. “You don’t waste any time in making your opinion known, do you?”

“I try not to. It’s much easier to keep up with the truth than with lies.” Lancelot tossed Arthur an arch look, still waiting for the outburst that continued to disappoint by its absence. Honestly, no man could fight as fiercely as Arthur did and still have such impenetrable patience. “Besides, I think the sooner a dispute is out in the open, the better.”

“Do you.” Something about the Bible seemed to frustrate Arthur, making him turn the pages faster and faster until he finally clapped the thing shut and put it back on the table. Then he leaned back, letting his head fall till he was staring at the ceiling. “Well, then. If we’re to work together, then what are your opinions on Rome, Christianity and myself?”

Taken aback by the sudden turn in the conversation, Lancelot took a few moments to mull over the questions. He scrutinized Arthur for any sign of trickery, but the other man merely continued to watch the shadows twist across the ceiling, his face showing nothing.

In the end, Lancelot decided to risk an unvarnished answer. When in doubt, attack. “Rome should leave. It’s a hypocritical Empire that thinks pretending to civilize savages is a good excuse for ruining entire peoples that sprang up without any outside help, and it’s only here because it thinks that this way it can keep us from invading its neighboring provinces. As for Christianity, a man can believe whatever he wants as long as he doesn’t try to tell me he knows how I should think.”

“And me?” Almost perfect in his unwitting imitation of Tristan, Arthur spoke as if they were merely discussing the weather. Which they were, in a way, but his calm was still suspicious.

“And—and—” Warmth was rising in Lancelot’s face again, and he bit down on his lip, futilely trying to will away his blush. “And I wonder that you can be part of both of those, because in the week that I’ve actually known you, you’ve shown yourself to be better than them.”

Arthur winced and straightened up only to stare at his linked hands. The shadows in his neck and face seemed to deepen, turning him disturbingly gaunt. “Then you’ve only met the worst of Rome and Christianity, if you can say that. Rome is a great city, full of art and ideas and learning, and Christianity encompasses…the widest spectrum of humanity. There’s a man, both Roman and Christian like me. Pelagius. He preaches that all men are born free.”

“Are you sure he’s really a Roman?” Lancelot skeptically asked.

“A Roman citizen. He also hails from Britain, but I met him in Rome.” Sighing, Arthur raised a hand and rubbed at the bridge of his nose, then at his temples. “I know that there is injustice after injustice in Roman rule, but for the most part, I think it does more good than bad.”

Snorting, Lancelot slouched down and rested his head on the top of the chair. “The rule itself, or the men who enforce it? Ideas are all fine and well, but their true effect’s in the execution, and that comes down to individuals.”

“You remind me of…no, not really. Tone, yes, but not content.” The slip from Latin to Sarmatian indicated that Arthur was muttering to himself. He rubbed his hands over and over his face, trying to wipe the tiredness off it, then clapped his palm over a yawn that seemed to unhinge his jaw.

To his surprise, Lancelot found himself also yawning. He reluctantly rolled himself onto his feet, but grinned stupidly wide when he saw a hint of disappointment in Arthur’s eyes. “The conversation was very stimulating, but the flesh is weak. I should probably get back to your bed.”

“You’re swaying.” Arthur stood up as well and slung an arm beneath Lancelot’s, helping him walk the few paces back. 

It should have been humiliating, but either Lancelot was too tired to care, or he was too busy enjoying the opportunity to feel Arthur’s muscles shifting against his side. Or both. He simply stopped thinking about all the little nagging details and let Arthur get him to bed.

When the other man was straightening up, Lancelot’s head cleared enough for him to catch Arthur by the arm. “You asked three questions; I’ve only got one. Do you hate Sarmatia?”

By some trick of the dim light, Arthur’s eyes were a vivid glowing green, like a night-beast’s gaze. “No. I fight the people that fight me, not the land itself.”

* * *

In order to know that the meeting wasn’t going to go well, Merlin didn’t need to peek outside and divine by flights of birds, or to watch the dying spasms of a man. He needed only to see the dark shadows beneath Arthur’s eyes, and the red rims of Guinevere’s. Both of them looked as if they’d already fought half the coming war.

The gathered Sarmatians seemed to pick up on the unease in the Roman high command; the knights Arthur had saved from the massacre glanced at each other with as much worry as Merlin felt, but the other Sarmatian representatives traded looks of sly delight. They were meeting in a broad open space before the garrison walls, equidistant from both camps so neither party would have an advantage, but Merlin still didn’t feel reassured. The only reason he didn’t double-check the archers he had secreted about the field was that he knew that would only make things worse. There were too many eyes just waiting to spot a misstep.

Fortunately for everyone, Arthur and Guinevere were not fools nor blind. They conducted the formal negotiations with Dagonet and Bors’ tribes with exemplary behavior, gracefully proposing and retreating in a way that yielded the best terms possible, in an agreement worded with perfect clarity. Of course, that still didn’t mean that they were all safe, but it did get everything out into the open where it couldn’t later be denied except by outright recantation.

Consequently, the explosion was delayed until they were safely back in the garrison and some fool of a courier shoved a dispatch in Arthur’s hand just as Lancelot was limping up to speak to Bors. As was her habit, Guinevere absently moved to read over Arthur’s shoulder, then froze halfway when Arthur turned to stare. Her expression turned momentarily stricken, then hardened when she noticed that Lancelot was watching. “Which garrison is that from?” she asked, voice the perfect example of cool professionalism.

Arthur frowned and dug into the saddle-bag, then produced an unusually large packet of letters. He casually glanced about the stables, gaze noting each interested face. “It’s a little too windy here. I think I’ll go inside and read them.”

Guinevere curled her nails into her palms. “With respect, sir, if it’s at all possible, I’d like to—”

“There are some confidential letters here; I think it’d be best if I read through them first by myself,” Arthur whispered, so low that Merlin, who was nearest to the pair, could barely hear it. 

The request wasn’t unusual and Guinevere generally acquiesced, trusting in Arthur to tell her everything later. Today, however, she grabbed him by the arm. “I’m your officer—”

Merlin stepped in and took her by the wrist, dragging her away. He glanced over his shoulder to see Arthur standing there, expression torn between gratitude and anger at having to be rescued. Then he turned back and said loudly, “Guinevere. There’s a problem at the armory and I’d like your advice.”

“You never need my advice,” she hissed.

A short glare silenced her, and after a few minutes of fast, silent walking, she started to come to her senses. “Oh—damn it. Lancelot must be gloating.”

Sadly, she was now too old for him to take her over his knee and apply a few whacks of his staff, so he had to rely on words. “Whether or not he’s gloating is irrelevant.”

“What! How the fuck—how can you say that?” Her anger was making her jumble her Latin and her Briton together, but she thankfully kept her voice down. “I thought you respected Arthur enough to care about whether he decides to destroy himself.”

“I don’t only respect him. I like him. Which is a serious thing, since I once took a vow never to like any Roman, and now it’s broken.” Nearby, two buildings jutted together to form a small alcove that would provide a little privacy. Merlin accordingly directed them that way. “But Guinevere, this is not simply about you and Arthur. This is war. Lancelot is an ally. Arthur is your commander. There are certain standards of behavior that have to be kept up. You need to at least remember that.”

When they reached the recess, she threw herself into it and shoved her back against the wall like a cornered animal. “You were the one that told me to end it with him.”

“I did no such thing. I told you to decide quickly. And when I said that, I meant _decide_. Lingering isn’t good when it’s pus in wounds, and it’s worse here.” In all truth, Merlin would have preferred to see Guinevere and Arthur together, and Arthur come to Britain, but he’d fought beside Arthur long enough to know that certain things about the man were set in stone. And unless Arthur himself wielded the hammer, those would never change.

The truly sad part, Merlin thought, was that Guinevere might have been able to hand Arthur that hammer but for her own firm beliefs. Perhaps it was due to the inevitable difficulties of being a stranger in a foreign land, a woman in what was supposed to be a male occupation—and even if the Britons didn’t mind, she still had to play the man whenever they’d combined forces with one of the other garrisons—but she simply couldn’t surrender all of herself. Whereas Arthur probably could, given the right combination of circumstances; he already threw too much of himself into righting the myriad little wrongs that everyone else simply took for part of life, and since he got precious little return for it, it had to be dedication to principles that motivated him. Deep down, Guinevere still didn’t trust anyone enough to let them wholly into her. Arthur would have had to force his way in, and he would never do that.

“No.” Guinevere let out a deep breath, then lifted her chin to reveal eyes dulled by resignation. “No, you didn’t say that. I apologize.”

“You only need to do that if I take offense, and I didn’t. I understand.” Merlin held out his arms.

After a moment’s hesitation, she came to him and let him enfold her in a tight embrace. “Foster-father, and better at that than most real ones. Is there anything you don’t understand?”

“A good deal, but I know that and so I don’t interfere with it. But I do know something about this.” He stroked her hair till her breathing grew less ragged, and then he readied himself to go on. “What are you to each other now?”

“Commander and officer. And friends still, I hope.” She nestled against his shoulder, fingers twining in the hem of his cloak.

Nodding, Merlin planted the end of his staff in the ground and braced himself in case her anger rose again. “Then you should tell him that. And Guinevere—you cannot dictate his life. If he chooses Rome…if he chooses Sarmatia…”

“He can do better than that clever ass,” she muttered, still recalcitrant about that point. But before Merlin could reply, Guinevere was wrapping her arm around his neck and shaking her head. “No, no—you’re right. Though I then have the right to make my disapproval clear.”

“Disapproval, yes. Intervention, no.” Merlin thought a moment. “And you know Arthur better than anyone. That should tell you what chances Lancelot has.”

She simply lifted her head and gave him a wan, bitter smile. “But it does.”

* * *

While the utter stupidity and short-sightedness of his fellow commandants wasn’t unexpected or unfamiliar—Sarmatia wasn’t a desirable post by any means, and so its assignment was usually seen as a punishment; Arthur was deemed eccentric for actually requesting it—this last instance was by far the grossest piece of…of…

“Shit!” Arthur slammed his fists into the stone wall and felt his knuckles burst. The pain, however, was completely subsumed by the rage that pervaded every particle of him. All his private vows of compassion and patience and tolerance flared up and burned to ashes in its wake, and he was hard put to just remember that he couldn’t kill the other Romans. For one, it would mean leaving the garrison, and _that_ he now couldn’t do.

He could write. He had written, using every trick of rhetoric and underhanded implication that he’d had to learn during his time in the Roman army, and it had all been to no avail. Still…he whirled back to his desk and tore out a fresh piece of parchment, then seized the nearest reed pen and scribbled down the words as fast as he could.

The creaking of the door barely penetrated his consciousness, but the gasp did. “You’re writing with your own blood?”

“No…” Arthur dashed off the last word, then jerked himself around to face the intruder.

Lancelot stood there, but his eyes were fixed on the desk. Confused, Arthur looked back and only then saw the poor letter, blotted and stained from the blood that was still running from his knuckles. Towards the end, the words were more crimson than black, though when the blood dried they’d all be about the same color.

That struck Arthur as funny, and he allowed a few derelict chuckles to drop from his lips as he tossed the pen aside. It skittered over the far end of the desk and would have fallen, except a quick hand caught it and gently replaced it with the others. Lancelot leaned over Arthur, worried and fearful. Understandably so, since he’d have to work with Guinevere if Arthur were indisposed with madness. 

The thought sobered Arthur, and he felt his smile collapse under its own strain. “Is there something you wanted to discuss?”

“The messenger from Gawain’s tribe just returned—they’ll be here by the end of next week. I…” Fingers drifted to Arthur’s hands, floating over the raw patches. “What happened?”

It probably would have been the discreet approach to fob Lancelot off with some lie, but Arthur wasn’t terribly enamored of that method at the moment. “The other garrisons aren’t coming at all. In fact, they’re withdrawing to safer territory, and they advise me to do the same.”

Lancelot went very still. “And what is your answer?”

“I gave my word that I would fight here, beside you. I won’t break it.” Arthur suddenly felt as if he were a thousand years old, and that each year was weighing him down. He slumped back in his chair and looked up at Lancelot, watching the disbelief play over the other man’s face. “You thought I’d leave.”

“You…you have no support and you’re in…neutral to unfriendly territory. It’s suicide to stay. In fact, it’s suicide to tell me this even before your officers,” the other man stammered. He started forward, then suddenly grabbed for the edge of the desk and half-collapsed over it, face going white as bone. “Then again…”

With a sigh, Arthur stood and made Lancelot sit on the desk, then ran his palms over the other man’s bandages. “It wouldn’t have taken long for you to find out anyway. As you said, it’s better to be honest right away. There’s a reason why a garrison was put here: you and I both know that this area commands the gateway to all of Sarmatia from the north. If the Goths get a foothold here, nothing will be able to dislodge them.”

When Arthur touched Lancelot’s left hip, the other man hissed and flinched, then grabbed for Arthur’s hands before he could do a closer inspection. Lancelot pushed himself off the desk and thus put them flush against each other, so close that Arthur could see the man’s pupils expanding. “But if you’re all killed here, there will be no one to hold the land against the next wave of Visigoths that decide to winter in the south.”

“There’ll be your people; I know you aren’t bringing all that you can up here. There’ll be time for someone else to come.” At the least, Arthur would die knowing that he had fulfilled his responsibilities. Now that Guinevere had distanced herself from him, that was all he had. Rome was so far away, and even Christianity seemed to have grown too cold in the harshness of the steppes. He’d found more life in a short conversation with Lancelot than he had with hours and hours of rereading his texts.

Speaking of, Lancelot’s expression seemed to be struggling against that very fact as various emotions fought for the right of predominance. His face seemed about to burst with all the energy that was animating it, and his eyes were brighter than the sun.

“You are the most incomprehensible man I’ve ever met,” he blurted. Then he ducked his head and fervently kissed Arthur’s hands.

It was frantic at first, teeth nicking the scrapes as much as tongue soothed away the blood. The shock, however, kept Arthur from reacting and so Lancelot had time to make it pleasurable, gently pressing his lips to the flayed knuckles and slipping his tongue-tip in between each finger to tease the delicate skin there. He sucked in Arthur’s thumb, then let it audibly pop out as he glanced up, oddly demure in his ravishing.

The room was so hot that everything shimmered and wavered, distorting so much that it had to be a dream. Arthur felt himself swell out of his skin and rise to the ceiling, where he watched himself cup Lancelot’s face and tip it up so their mouths were nearly touching. His thumbs were rolling along those lovely cheekbones, then stroking down to pet the lips while Lancelot sighed and pressed himself to Arthur, languid as an errant sunbeam.

Then Arthur saw Guinevere appear in the doorway and halt, eyes and mouth both wide open, and he crashed back into himself. It was impossible to say which burned more—the loss of Lancelot’s warmth as Arthur pushed him aside, or the agonized pain in Guinevere’s eyes.

“What—” Lancelot turned around and saw her as well; his lips thinned and his stance hardened. “I see I should remember to close the door.”

“I see that you require more than a man’s word, even when that man is Arthur. You would do better to remember that a mere fuck means little in the long run.” She stepped aside and made a grandly sarcastic gesture that invited him to leave.

For some reason, he looked at Arthur, and Arthur felt himself nod. Back stiff, Lancelot awkwardly limped out of the room. As he passed Guinevere, they turned to give each other a long look that promised many dark things. Arthur sat back down and grimly added yet another item to his list of matters gone awry under his watch.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Guinevere said in a flat, expressionless voice. She quietly closed and locked the door, then came over to the desk. Her long, elegant fingers expertly sorted out the letters and reports that littered the top; Arthur remembered that he’d last tasted them just eight days ago.

Eight days, and he was already being faithless to her. If that was the kind of man he was, no wonder she’d wanted a separation.

“We’re…there’s business to attend to. What do the dispatches say?” There was the slightest tremble in Guinevere’s voice, and she had to press her hands against the desk in order to keep them from shaking. 

Arthur wished he could do something, say something, but he’d already done quite enough. The least he could do now was honor her wish to keep up pretenses.

Slowly, he sat up and forced himself to look at her, but that was so painful that, like the coward he was, he dropped his gaze to the dispatches. And he told her, and they calmly discussed the appropriate reactions to take, and she read through his reply letter and even suggested some additions for the fair copy that would actually be sent out.

And during all that time, Arthur felt himself growing blacker and fouler till he wondered that he didn’t fall apart into a pile of rot.

* * *

Ten minutes lying in an increasingly stuffy and dark room had convinced Tristan that he hadn’t yet had his fill of sunlight for the day. Dagonet had moved out to stay with his tribe and thus Tristan and Galahad had separate beds, but even that new space wasn’t enough to alleviate the sense of squeezing pressure he felt whenever he was inside.

It wasn’t the bed, or the treatment, because both of those were quite fine. It was probably remembering the feeling of blood pulsing out of himself, rocks stumbling his staggering feet, and darkness drunkenly fractured by torchlight glinting off steel. And snarling feral faces driving him beneath an upturned wagon, then trying to skewer him to it. They’d missed, but sometimes he thought he saw their shadows coming back to correct that.

“Oh, fuck. Not again.” A finger none-too-gently prodding his face.

Tristan grabbed that wrist and flipped the other man beneath himself, then came back to the present to find an exceedingly irritated Galahad squirming in the hay. The other man shoved him off and went back out of the stall. “Bastard. Now I’m thinking I should take these back.”

He reappeared with two misshapen bundles, one of which unrolled to display a full selection of blades. The other turned out to be a caged hawk.

“Where did you get her? The Britons don’t keep these as pets.” As Tristan got down on his belly to better meet the bird’s stare, he could feel an odd warmth wriggling through him. Right next to the suspicion at Galahad’s behavior. “Why did you get her?”

Galahad was busy picking out a sword from the assorted weapons and testing its balance. He was making it a point to avoid looking at Tristan. “She’s already trained. Lucky for you, since you can’t ride for at least another week.”

“Maybe I can’t ride, but I can beat you if you even think about taking that one.” Out of the corner of his eye, Tristan watched Galahad’s hand suddenly detour to a different dagger. He allowed himself a quick grin that mostly hid in the hay and crept closer to the cage, slowly walking his fingers to the latch. The hawk ruffled and he froze, then softly hummed to her. She clicked her beak and settled, but didn’t stop eying him.

Rasping sounds, clear and even. It seemed Galahad had remembered to bring a proper whetstone as well; he usually scavenged one from the ground, or snitched one from the nearest careless knight.

“Were you given those, or did you…appropriate them?” Hawk in hand, Tristan carefully lifted her out and sat up.

“Given.” Galahad snorted as he checked the newly-sharpened edge of one. “There’s a lot more than the standard Roman issue; makes me wonder just what Arthur’s been up to. He didn’t get them all from fighting us, either.”

Tristan shrugged and petted his hawk till her eyes closed, a signal both of pleasure and of acceptance. Then he transferred her to a nearby rail and turned himself to the weapons, which were indeed a curious selection. Galahad had even managed to find a saber that fit Tristan’s hand as if it’d been made for him. “I have a feeling that Arthur is much more than anyone knows.”

“Watch your mouth,” Galahad laughed. “Lancelot’s going to start thinking he has even more competition.”

“If I wanted a Pendragon, I wouldn’t be taking gifts from you. Lancelot’s a snob, but he can’t help it.” The weight of a dagger was a welcome familiarity, even if Tristan’s wrist did tremble a little after he’d set it down with the rest. He’d lost strength and speed during convalescence, and he’d have to work on that.

Galahad was oddly silent. Then a hand fell on Tristan’s shoulder and spun him around into a hot, angry mouth. “I can never tell whether you’re insulting or complimenting me,” Galahad gasped in between nipping and licking.

He was messy. Messy and frantic and for some reason, Tristan found himself rolling into it, trying to fumble past the hands that were sliding all over him, not really having a rhyme or reason but nevertheless doing a good job of making his entire body shiver. His side twisted out a twinge of pain, but Galahad sucked out his gasp and stroked one palm repeatedly over it.

Hay rustled and crushed, filling the air with a sweet mustiness. Yellow fragments drifted through Galahad’s hair to scratch against Tristan’s face; he turned to rub them away and then almost swallowed a mouthful when their knees slid past each other to fit certain things together. For someone who regularly resembled a sullen puppy, Galahad was surprisingly good at this. Still completely without any kind of discipline so Tristan had to dig his fingers into the other man’s hips, but the fervor and the vigor was overwhelming.

And even when spasming, Galahad wouldn’t stop mouthing at Tristan’s neck, which felt amazingly good and bone-melting and…“You’re…you’re very lucky you didn’t get us stabbed. Should’ve wrapped up the blades first.”

Galahad grunted into Tristan’s throat and stayed slumped on top, nibbling at Tristan’s pulse. “Picky bastard. I always thought you were supposed to do this with someone you liked. Clearly, I was wrong.”

Tristan smiled and roughly ran his fingers through Galahad’s hair, drawing out as many yelps as sighs. “So what was the hawk for?”

“Oh, I figure that if you’ve got to look after that, you’ll stop having fits, or whatever earlier was.” The other man propped himself up on his elbows, solemn-faced as he regarded Tristan. “You know…when you do that, your eyes die. It’s—terrifying.”

No matter how Tristan looked, he only saw genuine fear and honesty in Galahad’s face. Eventually he stopped searching and simply took it in, setting up the memory against that of the killing dark.

Fast footsteps in the aisle. More than one pair—Galahad, the idiot, started to sit up. Tristan smacked a hand over the other man’s mouth and rolled them into the far end of the stall. He was about to go back for his hawk when the first set of feet stopped and Lancelot said, acidly sweet, “Guinevere, was there something you wanted to say?”

“There’s quite a bit, but since there’s a war on, I’ll restrain myself to the essential.” Although Tristan had no idea what had precipitated this conversation, he could hear clearly enough the implication of frivolity her words laid on Lancelot. “Arthur is Roman. Moreover, he’s a man of his word, and nothing can break or influence that.”

“I didn’t think that this had much to do with speaking.” The insolence flowed off Lancelot, turning his voice slick and smoky with sarcasm. “At least, it didn’t seem that way from where I was.”

Galahad squeezed Tristan’s arm, then nodded to the swords lying at the side, wanting to know if they should intervene. Tristan shook his head; the words that were flying back and forth were bitter, but not yet fatal.

“You damned arrogant son of a bitch,” Guinevere growled. “This involves more than a little fun in bed. You’ve both got responsibilities.”

“And I’m fulfilling them far better than you. By now every single man, woman and child in the Sarmatian camps outside knows that you and Arthur are having problems, and moreover, that it’s your fault.” Lancelot paced to the end of the stable and then came back, rattling a loose rail as he leaned against it. “If you want to talk duty, then consider that Arthur would be far more trusted if he were seen to favor the Sarmatians. He’s spent enough time scourging this land for us to be wary.”

She hissed something in a language that Tristan assumed was Briton, then hit a post with something. “That’s your sole motivation, is it? Somehow I see you as thinking too highly of yourself to make such a noble sacrifice.”

Pause. Then, considering: “So you two are separated. You don’t deny my accusation.”

“It doesn’t matter whether or not we share a bed. Arthur and I _won’t_ be divided by just a pretty face. You can tell that to your people, once the Goths are dead and you’re turning your eyes back to this garrison.” With that, Guinevere stalked out of the stables.

When Lancelot didn’t make a sound after several long moments, Tristan cautiously stood up. The other man’s back was rigid, and the fists Lancelot had wrapped about the railing were almost completely white with the force of their hold.

“I’ve taken to just assuming you’re around,” Lancelot said, still not turning. “Can’t blame you for listening in when it’s so interesting.”

“It does affect more than you, her and Arthur.” Tristan reached behind him and grabbed Galahad’s hair, making the other man stay out of sight.

Lancelot nodded, an acknowledging smile harshly twisting his mouth. “She’s right about more than that, damn the bitch. I’m beginning to think this all started before I found out Arthur’s lineage.”

“Well, if he ends up accepting what that means—”

“I’d want him to accept it because of me, and not accept me because of it!” Lancelot snapped, pivoting to reveal a face that was struggling to contain far too many emotions for any one man. He turned back and bowed his head, then faced Tristan again with a composed mask haphazardly shoved on. “By the way, there’s bad news. Round up everyone; we’ll meet in Arthur’s rooms since it doesn’t look like he’ll want to be near me for a while.”

Before Tristan could answer, the other man had walked out of the stables, limp almost gone in his fury. Galahad shook off Tristan’s hand and peered after Lancelot, frowning. “Bad news isn’t nearly saying it.”

“Leave it alone. We don’t know enough about Arthur or Guinevere to do anything.” Tristan petted his hawk, whispering a thanks for its serenity, then stooped down and began gathering up the blades.

Surprisingly enough, Galahad squatted down without any more protests and helped. “I’m starting to think that I don’t even know Lancelot. At least you don’t really change.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Tristan hesitated, then craned across the swords and kissed Galahad. “Thank you.”


	4. Chapter 4

When Merlin didn’t speak, Arthur finally abandoned his attempts at making sense of the newest scouting reports and turned around to face the other man. “I know you have an opinion on this. You’re the most experienced officer I have, and I have complete faith in your judgment.”

“This isn’t a military matter.” Standing on the other side of the table, Merlin continued to mark out the latest maneuvers of the Goths—though ‘latest’ was really a misnomer. Any news they had of their enemies was several days old, despite all attempts to quicken transmission time.

It was a simple matter of geography: the Goths were separated from Sarmatia by a mountain range that was largely impassable even in high summer. Only one pass was wide enough to permit the quick passage of an army big enough to subdue the entire province, and a river ran through it to flow past Arthur’s garrison, which was at the base of said pass, to the west. Therefore, as long as Arthur guarded the river, he held Sarmatia. Conversely, as long as the Goths stayed to the other side of it, he could do little to find out what they were doing.

Then again, it was currently difficult enough to simply keep abreast of what was going on in his own camp. Two more Sarmatian tribes had arrived in the two and a half weeks that had passed since the massacre of their leaders, bringing the total to four, and with them came more and more intrigues; though they all detested the Romans as a matter of course, they weren’t guaranteed to be friendly to each other. It was fortunate that the new leaders seemed to have forged strong bonds during their recovery together and thus managed to keep that friction to a workable minimum.

Would that Arthur could do as well with his own staff. Eight years in Sarmatia spent painfully gaining the trust of the Britons, and in less than a month…“Merlin, it’s a military matter if it affects the morale and loyalty of my soldiers. And we both know that it does.”

“They don’t blame you.” Merlin scratched the last mark, then put his palms against the table and arched his back to work out the cramps, as they’d been planning for quite a while. He briefly raised concerned eyes to Arthur before reaching for the oil lamp and adjusting its wick. “And they…don’t entirely blame Guinevere either. To be truthful, a good many of them are relieved. They’re looking forward to seeing her in Britain, and when she was with you…you’ve always been fair and just to us, Arthur, but you’ve renounced your Briton heritage.”

“I don’t see how I couldn’t have. That land’s taken too much from me to try and love it. And I’ve never pretended not to be what I think I am most: a Roman.” Though sometimes, when he woke to a cold bed and a colder absence in the air, Arthur wished that he could have seen things Guinevere’s way. He wasn’t yet dead, but he could feel himself teetering on the edge of the deep hole that had been torn out of him. If he didn’t find something to fill that soon, his foot would slip and then that would be the end of him.

As if sensing Arthur’s thoughts, Merlin quietly poured them some water and forced the cup into Arthur’s hand. “I don’t attack your decision to do so, but I do wonder about your use of the phrase ‘what I think I am.’ A man needs to know where he comes from before he can arrive at where he’s going.”

“I learned to lead troops in Britain, you know. With the Sarmatian cavalry that was stationed there at the time.” While it wasn’t a politic idea to take this approach, it was the honest one. What with the way things were going, Arthur wanted to get out everything into the open. He’d decided that he much rather preferred facing something before him than worrying about tripping over it in the dark. “The Woads are still fighting the Romans, and I fought the Woads.”

Merlin nodded without a single ripple of emotion disturbing his serenity. “I know. Our people taught you war and hatred and grief, and then you came here and taught us compassion and forgiveness.”

Arthur had to laugh at that, even though the hollowness of it pained him. His knees and back were aching from standing so long, so he sat down and rested his head in his hands. “Don’t make me out to be a saint, Merlin. You’ve seen me fail too many times for that.”

“I’m not. I’m telling you that this world of ours is complicated enough that I don’t find fault in you for doing what you think you must.” In the yellow light, Merlin’s features were darker on dark, seeming to be stained with burgundy and gray and umber. It was as easy to transplant his menacing phantom to the forests that timbered Arthur’s memory as it was to simply see an older, wiser subordinate, who was far more faithful than Arthur deserved. “You know that when we return home, we plan to take up the fight of our ancestors.”

“Yes. Though I do regret that I haven’t managed to change your minds about that.” Other commandants beat the fear of Rome into their soldiers, which was a practice that Arthur had always seen as doing more harm than good. Now, he had to acknowledge that brute force had its effect on men—but he still rejected its methods. If there’d been a failure, then the blame laid with Arthur; come to think of it, Lancelot had said something about ideas and the quality of the men that executed them.

Merlin finally showed a trace of emotion, his sigh heavy with frustration. “But you have, Arthur. When we return to fight in our homeland, we will not be fighting _Rome_. We will be fighting men. For better or for worse, you have shown us that Romans are still human, and that they come in as many colors as nature can produce.”

“Then tell that to Guinevere,” Arthur growled, suddenly choking as the cinders of his angry confusion flared up. “She seems to think that my lack of affection for Britain somehow equals a lack of affection for her. But if it’s as you say and the land and the man are not one and the same—”

“I tell nothing to either of you, despite your misunderstanding of that point.” The staff appeared from nowhere to Merlin’s hand, and he used it to shut the shutters of the window over the table with a little more than the necessary force. Then he jabbed the tip down a handspan from Arthur’s toes and leaned against it, taking up the role of the sage. “You are grown adults, and you are perfectly capable of walking your own paths, wherever those lead.”

Startled by Merlin’s uncharacteristic sharpness, Arthur absorbed the words in silence. Guinevere was firm on the point that they had grown to the point where they couldn’t continue as they were, but Arthur was beginning to believe that things weren’t as fixed as she thought. On the other hand, the changes he was noticing did nothing to diminish the separation between them.

They still managed to work together well enough, but when the time came to fight, they would need more than that. Either the wound had to be stitched together, messy as the job would be now that the injury’d had time to fester, or it had to be burned clean.

“Why did you choose to come here?” Merlin was interested enough to _look_ interested. “Or did you have a choice?”

“No, I did.” Arthur smiled at the other man, feeling the sardonic irony behind that, and then leaned back in the chair. He let his hands dangle limply from his knees. “When my mother died, I went to Rome. Then I went back to Britain, hoping to recover something, but only learned that I hated the very ground I walked on. Sarmatia…the only things that made Britain a little tolerable were the Sarmatian knights I commanded—some of them remembered my father.”

The other man made a low, thoughtful noise in his throat, but didn’t comment.

“But in the end, they weren’t enough. Still, they’d told me stories about here…and then I found out that this was where the British legion was sent.” And having failed once at trying to transmute his idealism into reality, Arthur had foolishly thought he could try again. His youthful dreams made him feel a strange mixture of cynical amusement, shame and nostalgia that twisted his gut in nauseating ways. “I volunteered to come, and then I volunteered to stay.”

“Why?”

Arthur shrugged, not quite knowing himself. “Because…because the Britons here are different—they gave me a chance. Because I fell in love with Guinevere. Because sometimes this land is beautiful.”

A draft softly rattled through the room, ruffling the maps and causing Merlin to draw his furs more closely around himself. For a moment, he looked old, and then the light flickered him back to his customary agelessness. “And now that you don’t have her?”

“Now I have a duty to the Sarmatians. They asked for help, and I am able to give it.” It was late and Arthur needed to eat something, then do his last tour of the day. If he stretched it out long enough, he might be able to sneak into his rooms after Lancelot was asleep; the fort was too crowded and the man still too hurt to be shifted elsewhere.

Or so Arthur told himself. It seemed that lately he’d developed a habit of wanting things that were just out of reach, though in this case that was by Arthur’s choice rather than Lancelot’s. Still, with Guinevere more gone than not to Arthur, it made a perverse kind of logic to keep the possibility—which he was determinedly not even considering—near.

Consequently, here Arthur was, plotting ways to creep into his own rooms because of an awkward set of circumstances that he himself had created. He was starting to wonder whether he was in a war or in a farce.

“I hope you find something else,” Merlin said. When Arthur jerked around to stare questioningly at him, he merely stared back. “I would have liked to see you with Guinevere, it’s true, but I love you enough to wish you happiness. Wherever that might be.”

For a moment, Arthur thought he’d heard _whomever that might be_ ; the oddity about Merlin was that he could be just as practical and hardheaded as any grizzled old centurion, but then he could turn around and bend reality through the lenses of his eerie gaze. “What are you saying?”

“Do what you need to do, both for the soldiers and for yourself. And do not forget the second half of my statement; you have a responsibility for your own health, Arthur.” Then the other man nodded and drew himself up straight, effortlessly slipping back into the role of the subordinate. “Is that it for the night?”

“Yes, thank you.” Of course, it wasn’t for Arthur, but he saw no point in entangling Merlin any further into his own mess.

He saw the other man to the door, and then he returned to his seat, thinking till his mind threatened to collapse with the effort. At that point, Arthur went out and did his rounds, a corner of himself still going through everything.

* * *

“You still haven’t told him?” Tristan didn’t precisely look shocked, but he certainly wasn’t approving, or anything resembling happy. “We know he has Excalibur. Your tribe will be here in two days.”

Since the fingers of both his hands were preoccupied with messing up his hair, Lancelot couldn’t grab the other man and shake him. Given that Galahad was busy filling one corner of the stall with a miniature thunderstorm, that was probably a good thing; Lancelot had swords now and could take both men at once, but he was still aching too much to come away unscathed. “I _know_ , all right? I’m not oblivious.”

Gawain rolled his eyes. “Just extremely stupid. Arthur’s not going to appreciate it if you spring this on him at the last possible moment.”

“And I know that too, but if you haven’t noticed, it’s been rather difficult for me to get near Arthur.” Lancelot dug his nails into his scalp, using the pain to clear his head, then reached for stall wall and dragged himself upright. “He’s very good at not being found when he doesn’t want to be.”

Patently confused, Bors was randomly checking each of their faces for a clue. After a few minutes of that, he finally asked: “What the fuck have you been doing?”

Galahad and Tristan glanced at each other, then joined Gawain in staring at Lancelot, who was seriously regretting his decision to call this meeting. And it didn’t help that he was hungry and both Dagonet and Bors reeked of a good dinner eaten somewhere.

Just before Bors asked again, Tristan gave a succinct, annoyingly accurate answer. “Arthur and Guinevere separated for some reason. Then she walked in on Lancelot and Arthur. Nine days later, all three are still avoiding each other.”

“I’m not avoiding Arthur. He’s avoiding me.” Lancelot glared at the other man in hopes that Tristan would miraculously disintegrate. Unfortunately, not only did that not happen, but it also had the annoying effect of getting Galahad to glower back, as if Tristan needed the defense. Considering how much time Galahad still had to spend snapping at Tristan before anything started, he was in no position to act superior.

Bors had his head in his hands and was emitting a sound that was the bastard cross of an avalanche’s rumble and a colicky horse. “You and the Roman?”

“The Pendragon,” Galahad muttered. “Frankly, I think that’s worse.”

“It’d help ease relations with…ah, what am I saying?” Politics had never been Lancelot’s favorite fact of life, and for good reason: it was a dark, dangerously slippery slope that was capable of sending men careening into paths they’d never consider in broad daylight. What it was, he thought, was the excuse for everything, which permitted entirely too much.

And he was developing a sense of caution only now, when it was far, far too late. The irony was bad enough, but the feeling of inevitability was even worse because Lancelot had always believed that a man made his own way in the world. Gods and demons might have their plotting and powers, but until he actually saw that with his own eyes, he wasn’t going to believe that they held sole responsibility. In the span of his life, he’d seen men do things that were unimaginably good and bad.

Gawain leaned out the stall, then glanced at Lancelot. “Does it matter that he is a Pendragon, or does it matter that he’s Arthur?”

“It…” Lancelot slumped against the wall and stared at his hands. A vision of larger, bloodier ones briefly overlaid them, and he tasted the ghost of sweet metallic blood in his mouth. “He won’t press his claim anyway. From what I’ve gotten to know of him…he wouldn’t be here if he didn’t think it was his duty.”

“So it’s because he’s Arthur.” The hawk on Tristan’s arm half-stretched its wings, then resettled them, easily making itself comfortable where it was. Likewise, the man holding it didn’t seem to have any trouble at all fitting himself against Galahad’s irritability; just this morning, Lancelot had caught them dozing together in Galahad’s sister’s tent.

The sight had aggravated his already raw feelings in odd ways, because even if he wasn’t particularly fond of Galahad, all three of them had gone through too much for Lancelot not to wish the other two the best. Galahad had been lucky that his one remaining sister had taken to Tristan on sight, otherwise they would’ve had to add intertribal quarreling as soon as Tristan’s people arrived. It was so easy for them, even with the way they still traded insults…

If Lancelot was jealous of _Galahad_ , then something was seriously wrong in the world.

“You think you can get Arthur for Sarmatia?” That startled all of them, because not only did Dagonet rarely speak, but he also was generally uninterested in this kind of strategizing to the point of determined ignorance.

“That has nothing to do with it.” Anger propelled the words from Lancelot before he quite knew what he was saying, but once he’d spoken, he couldn’t take them back. Not since they were truthful. “I wouldn’t even care if he were still just Arthur of the Britons, pain in our asses. I want him to stay here, but—”

But having once touched Arthur, tasted his flesh and blood and spirit and then seen the desire in the other man’s eyes to do the same to Lancelot…having to tolerate the agony of only a few short, curt conversations and a handful of fleeting glimpses…no, land and previous allegiances had little to do with it. Arthur had no problem giving up his life for a people that detested everything he stood for, and while Lancelot couldn’t really understand the reasoning behind that, he could understand the feeling. “I’m actually thinking of leaving if he does. You know, the Romans really are beginning to get beneath our skins.”

“You can’t leave,” Galahad said, the surprise finally jerking him out of his sulk. His eyes were round as eggs, as if Lancelot were some curiosity that he’d never seen before. “This is your homeland! And if there’s not you—”

“—or Arthur—” Tristan added.

“—then who’s going to lead?”

With a grace that was surprising for a man of his size, Dagonet shifted himself and made for the stall door. He clapped a hand to Lancelot’s shoulder in passing, then nodded to a puzzled Bors. “A land means nothing without the people in it. Better to be honest to them than false to the soil.”

All of them stared after his departing form, each with their own thoughts muddying the clarity of their gaze. Lancelot absently glanced down the other end of the aisle, then looked again. That moving speck that had caught his eye resolved into a shoulder-guard, which was pathetically well-known to him.

“Well, I’ve no idea what he meant, but Dag’s usually got his head on right.” Bors pushed himself out of the stall and ambled after his friend.

One by one, the other knights did the same, until it was only Lancelot in the stable with his perfect view of Arthur, now kneeling on the ground with head bowed in prayer. He’d seen the man at that several times, but never outside.

Lancelot still had no idea what he was doing, but he did know that if he didn’t act in some way soon, he wouldn’t be able to stand the tension. Something had to give.

His foot edged out the stall, and then his other one took its step towards Arthur. Contrary to what everyone said, it didn’t get any easier the closer he came, but he kept moving.

* * *

Tristan settled his hawk on its perch, then sat down on the nearest pile of furs with a bowl of Merlin’s disgusting but effective herb-water and a fistful of bandages. He stripped himself to the waist and started tending to his wounds, patiently waiting for the conversation outside the tent to finish.

Faint giggle in a voice that was unusually deep for a woman. “Lovely one, brother.”

“Shut up.” Galahad still sounded tense from the earlier meeting.

“Oh, calm down. You know well enough that I’m happy with mine.” The shadows on the tent wall briefly merged in an elbow jabbing. “Besides, it looks as if you’ll be needing my womb, so I suggest you be nice to me.”

Embarrassed grunting, and then a strangled whine: “Do we have to talk about that?”

“Eventually. You’re lucky that we don’t have any grudges between us and his tribe—well, there was the one thing with…but she’s dead now.” The humor suddenly turned flat, and the shadows stiff.

“I won’t lie,” Galahad finally said, voice so soft that even Tristan had trouble hearing it. “None of them had easy deaths. It was…it was…”

They suddenly flowed together, dark wrapping into dark, and then just as suddenly stepped apart. But afterward, the shadows were a little more solid, a little more straight against the rippling of the fabric.

“You know, even I didn’t think you’d amount to too much. But I should’ve known better—you’re my brother, anyway. Stupid and hot-tempered, but still blood.”

It sounded like Galahad was snorting through a glass of water. When he spoke, his voice was still a little choked. “You’re a bitch, you know. But you do have good taste.”

“Well, so do you. At least with Sarmatians…this whole working with the Britons business has me a little worried. I’m hearing the strangest rumors about Arthur.”

Tristan’s fingers slipped and shoved a bit too hard against a sore spot. He barely managed to trap his hiss of pain against the roof of his mouth, then sat very still and kept listening. Damn it, he’d thought Lancelot had made it clear they weren’t going to discuss that twist outside of themselves; the sheer potential a few loose words on that subject had for producing gory mayhem should’ve been obvious even to the greatest of fools.

“Don’t believe them,” Galahad muttered. “He’s nothing like what all the old gossip said, and I doubt that these new rumors are any better.”

Though Tristan couldn’t detect any telltale hesitations or odd inflections in the other man’s voice, he wasn’t Galahad’s sister. Moreover, he couldn’t see what Galahad’s expression was doing.

Maybe it was too dark for anything to be seen. And maybe Tristan was turning into a hopeful idiot.

“And what about Lancelot? Actually, I’m not sure which worries me more—Arthur’s left proofs of his strength all over this land, but Lancelot…well, we _know_ him. You say that he’s taking over the leadership?”

“As much as he annoys me, he seems to know what he’s doing.” Galahad’s shadow shrugged. “Anyway, he couldn’t have pissed off that many people and still be living if he didn’t know how to fight.”

The subject change didn’t bring any relief to Tristan, who was extremely aware of the dangers of ambivalent feelings. Personally, he was for Arthur because the evidence indicated that the man was the best there was. He was also for Lancelot’s advances on the Roman because then there’d be some concrete support of Arthur’s claim to want to help the Sarmatians…and because frankly, the pairing worked out in his head. The one balanced the other in respect to Sarmatia, whereas Guinevere probably balanced Arthur against Sarmatia.

On the other hand, the difficulties regarding a rapport between a Sarmatian and a Roman Briton formed a garden of traps as far as the inner eye could see. Most of those would go away if Arthur wholeheartedly embraced his Sarmatian heritage, but that was about the least likely of the possible outcomes.

“True,” Elayne said, slow and thoughtful. “Well, we’ll see. In the meantime, I’d best leave you to—”

“Don’t even finish that,” Galahad snapped. His shadow whirled away, and a moment later, he flapped through the tent entrance just as his sister’s shadow had diminished to nothing. “Oh. You were listening again, weren’t you?”

Tristan shrugged and rolled the last bandage around himself; Merlin had impressed on all of them the need to change dressings once a day, and while he wasn’t afraid of the Briton, he also didn’t underestimate Merlin’s abilities. Better not to risk…whatever it was that lurked in the man’s eyes. “That’s what I do.”

“Spy?” Fingers brushed away Tristan’s and tied off the bandage for him, then slid down to settle on his waist. Their calloused tips rasp-rubbed languid prickles of heat into Tristan’s skin, while Galahad’s mouth attached itself to his neck. “Anyone just meeting you would think you the most untrustworthy person here.”

In the moment that it took Tristan to get the water bowl out of the way with one hand, his other hand had already half-skinned Galahad out of the intervening clothing. He grabbed the other man by the hair and forced Galahad to look him in the eye. “And do you trust me?”

“I wouldn’t be letting you sleep here if I didn’t, would I? You’re so damned annoying—that’s how I know. If you were trying to fool me, you’d be nicer.” Galahad’s hands suddenly dodged in between Tristan’s legs, and the resulting jumble of groans and grabbing and twisting saw them both flat on the bed. A laugh tickled Tristan’s shoulder just before stubble nuzzled it. “Fuck. Boots. Elayne will kill me if we mess up the furs and blankets—what the…”

Tristan finished wrenching their foot-gear off with his knees and toes, then rolled them over and took his time swiping the traces of the evening meal from Galahad’s mouth. He peeled away their remaining clothes, then rumpled up some of the furs so they wouldn’t freeze to death in the cold air. “You never learned to do that?”

“Now I have.” The hands were sliding around Tristan’s buttocks and cupping his prick to his thigh, then squeezing slowly down its length. Galahad was grinning, and for once, it was free of any petulance. He took advantage of Tristan’s distraction to flip them over yet again and kept Tristan too busy biting down on moans to think much on the scrabbling for some tiny jar, and then the fingers spreading something sticky inside him.

Then the fingers moved in certain ways, and Tristan clamped his knees around Galahad’s sides. The other man shoved at them, but Tristan was no longer in control of those parts of his body and so couldn’t do anything.

“You don’t relax enough,” Galahad mumbled, bending down to suckle at Tristan’s nipples till the resultant thrashing pried the knees off of him. He sank his teeth into Tristan’s shoulder, then somehow used Tristan’s bucking to slide out fingers and slide in cock, which was only half-hard at first and so seemed to grow as Tristan’s muscles got accustomed to the way it stretched him. “Ow. Damn it, if you keep hitting me I’ll start to think you want me to stop—”

In answer, Tristan pushed himself up and savagely kissed the other man, chewing on Galahad’s lip till he was shoved back down. Except for his hips, which were jerked upwards when Galahad moved. He arched into it and grabbed at Galahad’s shoulders, then at Galahad’s hips, scratching at them to hurry up and deal with the frantic rush of his blood through his body. Heartbeats were thudding in his ears, almost loudly enough to drown out the other man.

“Calm _down_.” Galahad tugged off Tristan’s hands and pinned them to the side. They stared at each other, watching the breath cloud the air between them.

Through that man-made fog, Tristan saw the blurry outline of the other man rise and bend, but he _felt_ the rocking. It drove deep and levered open and impressed him with the traces of fire. Shadows and shades, so different in the way they receded or advanced, sometimes—like now—coming so close that they went farther than any solid thing could. But still…he threw his head back and, just above the edge of the haze, glimpsed the sweat on Galahad’s forehead. A drop fell and burned reality back into him.

The other man’s face dropped near, ripping through the warm mists to rub against Tristan’s own while Tristan went boneless into Galahad’s ministrations. “You didn’t just have one of those fits, did you?”

“No.” Tristan wanted that word to have more weight than it did. He would’ve liked to have given it the measure of the mountains, which ruled both sky and land, but he couldn’t and so he simply pulled up Galahad’s fingers to twine with his own. “Nothing like that.”

And then, so the other man’s head wouldn’t swell too much, he _flexed_. Watched Galahad seize up and frantically begin moving again. “Never mind…tricky son of a bitch…Lancelot’s easier to understand than you, even—even if he’s stupid enough to say he’d—”

“I’ll leave my tribe.” The words hit Galahad squarely in the face, then raked down his back as he half-broke his scream in the blankets beside Tristan’s head.

When the other man had recovered a little, he shoved himself up on his arms and looked down at Tristan, expression wary with understanding. “Tell me I didn’t hear that.”

“You better have, because someone has to switch. Our territories are too far apart.” Tristan would have lifted his hands and buried them in Galahad’s hair, toying with the crisp sweat-melted curls, but his wrists were still being held down. Instead, he lifted his head and licked at the saltiness along Galahad’s chin, watching as eyelashes briefly fluttered shut above him. “I’ve a male cousin that could take my place.”

Galahad glared through eyes that were rapidly becoming wet and red. “Shut up until _after_ we get everything else sorted out.”

Then he dragged himself out of Tristan and tangled them so thoroughly in the blankets that it was impossible to do anything except lie there and listen to Galahad breathe. There were matters that needed to be dealt with and decisions to be made, but for the first time in a long while, Tristan wanted to do something else first.

He closed his eyes and went to sleep.

* * *

The relief that Arthur’s prayers brought had been diminishing for quite some time, but this was the first night that they’d failed even to give him a moment of serenity. He could kneel and fold his hands together, but his mind remained in other places, on other things that were very far from piety.

He wanted to run his fingers through Guinevere’s hair, and feel her breasts spill out of their loosened bindings into his palms. He wanted to watch her sleep and kiss that little furrow that sometimes appeared between her eyebrows.

But he wanted to know whether Lancelot’s mouth was sweet or spicy or some delicious combination of the two, and he wanted to know whether the man slept restlessly or still. He remembered the suppleness of Lancelot’s body against him, and the startling softness of Lancelot’s skin, and it tangled together so closely with Guinevere’s leanness and surprising vulnerability beneath the many-layered armor she wore that Arthur was hard put to distinguish the two. He saw long brown hair on his pillow curl short and black, felt smooth chest turn to swelling softness against him, and in his mind he twisted away only to fall into a black morass where flickering light danced just out of reach, teasing him with brushes and glimpses and quiet laughter.

The frustrated rage was almost a relief, because it at least was only Arthur’s, and not a piece of someone else that had taken root inside of himself. He let it rise to a growl in his throat and wrenched himself to his feet.

Lancelot was little more than a moonlight-edged blot on the night, but Arthur nevertheless recognized the man so quickly that he didn’t even reach for his sword.

“You pray often?” Lancelot asked.

“I did. Now, not so much.” Anger turned to lust, and lust to guilt, and guilt to an inebriation of resignation that made Arthur unusually reckless with his words. What did it matter, if everything that he did was destined to turn out wrong? “You’ve the honor of seeing my last time, I think.”

The silhouette went so still that it gave the impression of trembling. Then Lancelot took another step forward, moving him out of the stables’ shadows and into the slightly brighter area where Arthur was. “I can’t say that I’m upset about that.”

“I remember your words on Christianity.” Arthur should have made his farewells then and left, as he’d done for the past nine days, but he found that he couldn’t. Here, in the dark where all the reminders of his duty were shapeless phantoms, it seemed as if they’d stepped into another world. Here, he felt as if he could do as he pleased for once, and not as he must.

“When a man goes on his knees in Sarmatia, he only does so because he’s surrendering. I don’t understand why an all-powerful God would need a reminder of his strength. It smacks of arrogance to me.” Lancelot didn’t halt until he was less than a foot from Arthur, close enough to see the firmness in the man’s face. And the youth—he and Guinevere both had far less years than Arthur, yet they seemed to have found the faith Arthur still lacked. “What happened between us—”

Somehow, Arthur’s hand stole to Lancelot’s cheek, cupping it so the formation of each word could be felt. The other man stopped and swallowed, then began again with a shakier voice. “I don’t regret it.”

“I have the feeling that you don’t do much of that in any case.” Arthur lifted his other hand and drew the back of it down the side of Lancelot’s face. In a daze that was very much like drunkenness, he’d shuffled near enough to see the gleam of white teeth peeking from behind half-parted lips.

“You don’t—” Lancelot almost pulled himself back, but at the last moment couldn’t and so only came nearer. His eyes were very wide and very dark and very bruised, as if Arthur was hurting him from the inside out. “People say that I’m a conceited bastard, and they’re right. I hate being second, and being crossed, and being forced to acknowledge any kind of authority. But I would let you command me on the battlefield, and I would accept your faith and your Romanness, and I would tolerate seeing the memory of Guinevere in your eyes…if you would only look at me like you are now.”

Every time Arthur thought the pain couldn’t be worse, it intensified and spread into particles of him that he hadn’t even known he’d had. He stared at the damnation in his hands, and he called for his religion and his beliefs and his loyalty. But God didn’t speak here in the pagan steppes, Pelagius was woefully underinformed about the compromises necessary to balance discipline and compassion, and Guinevere had told him herself that his fidelity to her was worthless. Damnation too seemed to be an empty phrase now, scoured clean of any meaning by the same winds that were devastating Arthur’s life, and in this new landscape he could see no landmarks he recognized.

He saw nothing except the way Lancelot watched him lean down, fearful like the man thought he would stop at any moment. Except Arthur couldn’t do that now, because everything behind him was gone, and he could do nothing but move forward.

Lancelot tasted like air and water—no, like the essence of those. Refreshing and cool and then warming up much, much faster than expected. Liquid fire sweeping into Arthur’s mouth, sluicing down his front as the other man pressed in and wrapped his arms around Arthur. He moaned and tilted his head back, letting it hang in Arthur’s hands while he opened up to the ravaging kiss.

Fingers hooked into Arthur’s shoulders as if to pry off his cloak, then clutched at that garment when he smoothed one palm down Lancelot’s back. His hand dawdled where spine dwindled in between well-shaped buttocks, brushing the top of the swells, then swept around to curve with Lancelot’s waist and feel the vibrations of shifting muscle. The other man lolled in the hold, lipping at Arthur’s jaw, cheek, nose—seemingly anything he could reach.

“Seventeen days,” Arthur breathed, chasing his words with his tongue over Lancelot’s neck, down the arteries to the hollows that peeked from the collar. His breath wreathed the other man in white moist clouds, trying to make a heavenly apparition of a very earthly delight; it only took a moment to run his lips back up the elegant throat to replace that illusion with shivering flesh. “Seventeen days and you’ve made me forget so much. God—I almost don’t know where this is, what country—”

The hands on his back clenched, then weaved their way down. They froze on Arthur’s waist when he slid his thumb very softly across the back of Lancelot’s neck, but soon were moving again, pressing up between them and forcing a little space. Even in the dark, it was easy to see how bruised Lancelot’s mouth was. “Arthur…there’s something you need to know. Because your father was—”

“Arthur!” Someone was galloping towards them. “Arthur!”

One of Guinevere’s soldiers. Arthur stepped back from Lancelot and hurried into the light of the nearest torch to wave down the rider. “Here! What’s happened?”

“You’re needed at the—” The man stopped, squinting at something behind Arthur. “You’re both needed. Sir, Lancelot’s tribe arrived early. They’re at the south gate now, and Guinevere’s—there’s an argument going on—”

“I need your horse.” As soon as the man was off, Arthur was on. He started to raise the reins to whip the horse on, then remembered. He twisted around and grabbed the surprised Lancelot by the arm, hauling him into the saddle. Fortunately, the man’s reflexes kicked in and so it wasn’t too awkward a mounting. “What were you saying?”

They were clattering down one of the few paved roads in the garrison, but hoofs striking rock alone couldn’t account for the odd cracked sound he was hearing. After a moment, he identified it as Lancelot laughing, but not in happiness. “I left it too long…Arthur, I’m sorry. I’m sorry—I never meant to keep this from you, but you wouldn’t even stay in the same room with me for the past—do you have Exca—you do. Good.”

“What? What are you talking about?” But then they were heading down to the gate and Arthur could already see the ominous flash of metal in torchlight.

* * *

As far as Guinevere could tell, she had acquitted herself rather well in the nine days since her world had lurched to a stop. She had to determine this by the observation that the garrison was still intact and that the graveyards weren’t heaped high with new mounds of dirt, because in all honesty, it was difficult for her to remember exactly what she had done. Not when she was doing it; as soon as someone came to her with a problem she could remember precedence and procedure and judgment, but when that problem disappeared, so did her conscious rationality.

She wanted to kill him. A good deal of the time, she wasn’t sure which him she meant.

It’d been a good idea to do a spell of gate duty, she decided. Standing out in the cold night kept her body awake, and having to make conversation with the other guards made sure her sanity stayed intact as well. She hadn’t been so lucid in days—at least, not inwardly so. Even she found herself surprised at the ease with which she took to acting.

That thought linked to the last real conversation Arthur and she had had, and then she discovered just how easily composure was wrecked. Had they always been faking with each other? Was the hot burning in her chest and her eyes merely an illusion? Was Arthur?

After a moment, even her vengefulness said no. He couldn’t lie about something he didn’t know, and he truly didn’t understand what it meant to love a land. For an idealist, he had a surprisingly bad grasp of certain abstract concepts. But he did love her. That she knew beyond any doubt.

But then Guinevere had to wonder whether the land was so important, after all, and whether she had instigated their separation over a mere trifle. And again, all of her said that yes, it was because a land was not simply soil and plants and animals, but a collection of emotions and memories and truths that shaped the people that passed through it. Though she’d never seen Britain, it had carved her into what she was.

Rome had made an attempt at molding Arthur, and it was probably the greatest joke that he didn’t realize what set him apart from other men was not the parts of Rome that he used to shield himself, but the other pieces that were decidedly _not_ Roman. But they weren’t Briton, either. Which left only Sarmatian; Merlin had been making a point when he’d mentioned that Arthur had gone from Britain to Rome to Sarmatia, only Guinevere had been too blind at the time to understand. Now she did, but she was too furious to accept it.

Eight days. Eight days had been all Arthur needed to consider a life beyond Guinevere. Of course, she had told him not to wait, and she had wanted him to find happiness somewhere else, but—eight days. Damned _men_. He might as well have told her that their relationship had always been doomed.

Except if Guinevere was to be fair, she had to remind herself that it’d been for that very reason that she’d broken things off. She didn’t want to be fair, but too many years with Arthur had ingrained that too deeply into her to be ignored.

She wanted him to live and be hers, but it was clear that she couldn’t have both, and it was a brutal choice between them.

“Sir, there’s a rider coming.” One of the other guards suddenly straightened and pointed his finger to a slight flicker in the darkness.

Guinevere swallowed her smoldering uncertainty and nodded, gesturing for the archers above to make ready. Then she drew her sword, but kept it beneath her cloak, and waited for the blot to resolve itself into a problem.

As it turned out, there were actually three riders, and they all bore the marks of Lancelot’s tribe. They also had the safe-conduct passes the Briton messenger had left before returning to the garrison.

The nearest, a broad-shouldered swarthy man with only one working eye, fidgeted until Guinevere handed back to the passes before leaning down and opening his mouth to speak. Then he paused. “A woman? Guinevere herself’s come to meet us, then?”

“That is my name. I see my reputation’s spread far indeed. You’re an advance party, I take it?” She turned towards the field where the other Sarmatians had been temporarily quartered and gestured. “You’re two days early so everything isn’t quite ready, but that will be immediately seen to. Your area is staked out there, and if you’ll wait for a torch to be brought, a guide will—”

“We are an advance party, but we’re also a delegation, lady.” The man sketched an obeisance that faintly smacked of sarcasm; it was obvious what had made Lancelot the insolent prick he was. “Name’s Ector, and that’s Kay and Ban. We need to speak with Arthur.”

Guinevere raised her eyebrow and casually fluttered the edge of her cloak in such a way that it was nearly indistinguishable from the vagaries of the breeze. One of the Britons went off for Arthur, so quietly that only another Briton could’ve spotted him. “Artorius is a very busy man. As you can see from the size of the garrison.”

That took Ector aback for several long moments. He sank back in the saddle and regarded her through narrowed eyes while his two companions abruptly started walking their horses backward, scanning the walls before them for drawn weapons.

“Lady—”

“Guinevere,” she sweetly corrected.

Ector stiffly nodded. “Guinevere. It’s a matter of some urgency—this involves the question of our participation in the proposed alliance.”

“Proposed?” she repeated, hissing out the word. The three knights flinched back from her glower, which she’d been told could rival a basilisk’s on occasion. “You’ve already agreed to it, else we wouldn’t have permitted you to come this close.”

“You cannot _permit_ anything, _lady_ ,” sneered Ban. “This isn’t your land. You don’t have the right.”

On Ector’s other side, Kay started to reach for his sword, but before it was half-out of the sheath, an arrow had whistled past his ear. All three knights backed up then, looks of betrayal gracing their arrogant faces. “If this is the kind of welcome a small delegation has—”

“A delegation that wasn’t asked for by me!” shouted Lancelot’s voice over rapidly-approaching hoofbeats.

Guinevere didn’t turn around, but she heard him dismount while the horse was still slowing. The rise of bile in her mouth informed her as to when he walked up to stand beside her, face set in tightly wound fury. “Ector, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he snapped.

“Well, good to see you’ve recovered.” The other knight wasn’t behaving at all like a subordinate to a leader, and the worry started to overcome Guinevere’s annoyance. “And—” Ector looked past Lancelot to the newly-arrived rider, who walked his horse past Guinevere “—Artorius. It’s an honor.”

“Not when you maltreat my officer.” Arthur’s back was stiff, his words were ground out from a clenched jaw, and the anger rolling off of him was palpable. He’d launched straight into Sarmatian and so his voice thundered over the suddenly cringing knights. “My messenger was under orders to provide safe-conduct only if you agreed then to a preliminary allegiance agreement, with final terms to be settled once you arrived. Your behavior doesn’t reflect that.”

Ector stammered a bit, then noticed Guinevere’s pleased look. His face reddened and he pointed at the archers. “And what of those?”

For an indescribably tense moment, Arthur matched gazes with the man. Then Ector dropped his eyes and Arthur turned around to wave the archers away. In that split second, steel suddenly glinted in Ector’s hand.

“Don’t, you damned ass—” Lancelot shouted, lunging forward.

But the swords were already out and slivering sound with their clash, and Guinevere was already making for Kay, aiming to cut him off. However, the other man didn’t even notice her approach because his eyes were fixed on something else. When she was near enough, Guinevere could see that his face had gone deathly pale and his mouth was soundlessly working.

Then he abruptly slid out of his saddle and dropped to the ground on his knees, lowering his head to someone. Confused, Guinevere stopped and stared at him, but for all that he was concerned, she might as well not have been there. Only then did she notice that everything had gone still as death, as if waiting for some fool to shatter the tension and loose the storm.

Guinevere slowly turned around to see the other two knights in similar positions to Kay’s. They were all kneeling towards Arthur and Lancelot, but while she watched, Lancelot gave Arthur an anguished, pleading look before slowly sinking down in the same gesture of obeisance.

“What is this?” Arthur asked, voice as raspy as Excalibur was smooth, flowing silver in the night. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

* * *

Everything was deadly serious now, but it was also only a few hours from dawn. Galahad yawned, and then he stared down Gawain’s glare. “What? If you have to, you have to.”

“Then try to make it so you don’t have to. Simple solution.” Tristan was sitting beside Galahad and was therefore well within jabbing range, but something about the gleam in his eyes warned off all tricks of that nature.

The door opened, making them all snap to attention just in time to watch a stone-faced Ector walk out, closely followed by a hotly whispering Lancelot. When the two of them had reached the other door, Ector turned about for a quick conversation that sent him off with an expression of relief and left Lancelot looking sicker than Galahad had ever seen him. Including directly after Arthur had brought them back from the massacre site.

“So?” Gawain was so nervous he was bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“So,” came from the first door. “As the first Pendragon to return to this land in two hundred years, I thank Lancelot and his family for their stewardship of my tribe, and I excuse them from further responsibility.”

A straight line could have been drawn from Arthur’s eyes to Lancelot’s as Arthur spoke, but it would have only connected angry, betrayed bitterness to miserable, despairing regret.

“I can’t believe you’re doing this,” Guinevere snarled. She stepped out from behind Arthur and folded her arms across her chest, glaring at Lancelot. “Arthur, this binds you to Sarmatia! You’ll never make it back to Rome.”

“I knew that before I knew about this.” Arthur suddenly dropped the failing mask of cold formality and stood revealed as a man that had been pushed to the very brink, and was now capable of nearly anything. His gaze swept around the room, and even Tristan flinched a little from it. Only Lancelot stood firm, though even more color drained from his face. Perhaps because of that, it was on him that Arthur’s eyes finally settled. “This was what you were trying to tell me.”

Lancelot slumped against the side of the door and spread limp hands in a useless gesture. “I thought I had two more days…Arthur, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry that your damned trap worked? Sorry that you’ve won?” Guinevere’s fists beat a furious rhythm against her legs, and Galahad started thinking about how fast he might be able to trip her rush.

Surprisingly enough, it was Arthur who pivoted before her and blocked her way. “I am not a prize to be…furthermore—what do you care? You’ll be going to Britain, so what does it matter to you whether I stay here or in Rome?”

“Because it’s easier to lose you to a principle than it is to a face!” Taken by surprise, Guinevere wasn’t able to hide the raw hurt that suffused her face.

“You didn’t lose me—you rejected me!” Arthur twitched towards Guinevere, then yanked himself away to stare at the wall. His heaving shoulders slowly settled down, and when he next spoke, it was in a controlled, flat tone that fairly dripped with resignation. “It’s done and can’t be undone, Guinevere. Live your life and leave mine alone.”

Tristan nudged Galahad in the ribs, then cast a significant glance towards the door. Well, leaving as soon as possible seemed like a good idea, but Galahad didn’t see how it could be done without coming too close for comfort to Lancelot. He fluttered his fingers in a signal to wait; Tristan nodded and returned to keeping an eye on the mess unraveling itself before them.

Slack-jawed, Guinevere simply looked at Arthur as if she didn’t understand, though it was very clear that she did. On the other hand, he wasn’t yet done.

“Lancelot?” Arthur turned just enough to pinion the other man in his gaze. “Was this why? You wanted a leader?”

“I didn’t say what I did earlier for the sake of my tribe.” Lancelot closed his eyes, then sluggishly opened them, every movement slowed by the wretchedness that permeated him. “I told you, I’m selfish.”

Guinevere flicked daggers with her eyes. “That’s obvious.”

“Guinevere, _don’t_.” Still facing Lancelot, Arthur started to ask something else, then apparently changed his mind. He pursed his lips for a few seconds, formulating his new thought. “Then why?”

“You know how the story goes? Your great-grandfather entrusted the tribe to his closest friend, who was lucky enough to have been crippled and so escaped conscription. That friend, of course, was my ancestor. We held everything safe for the promised Pendragon who’d return bearing the sword Excalibur.” With sudden sharpness, Lancelot banged his head against the wall. Then he slid down and let his hands flop into his lap, his gaze fall from Arthur’s. “Honestly, I didn’t give a shit. And I wasn’t the eldest, so I didn’t have to. Then I met you, and I saw the chains you’d draped yourself in, and I didn’t want to add to them. I truly didn’t.”

Arthur blinked, then twisted to fully face Lancelot. “But—”

“But what? But an old pact gets surrounded by stories through the years, and so the Pendragon from Briton goes from exile to returning hero that’ll save us all from—” Lancelot wildly waved a hand “—from everything fucking wrong under the sun. And you know, when you’re dragged out of death’s teeth, you start taking a second look at that nonsense. First I wanted to see my people safe from the Goths. Then…it wasn’t until after I sent the message off that I found out what kind of man you were. You don’t deserve the burden.”

“I’ve had no choice but to take it. I gave my word to protect this land, and I’ll do whatever it takes to fulfill that vow,” Arthur said, harsh as the winter wind. He spared one last glance at Guinevere, who was looking at Lancelot as if she were mentally taking him apart, then strode out of the room with his eyes fixed solely on what was before him.

Lancelot turned and watched Arthur leave, his gaze so desperately hungry and hot and wanting that Galahad wondered when Arthur didn’t vaporize on the spot. Then he lurched to his feet and stared around the room with terrifyingly dull eyes. “So you see, Guinevere, I’ve won nothing at all.”

She crossed the room in less time than it took to breathe and punched Lancelot in the jaw. When he only staggered and didn’t immediately go down, she punched him again, and then she grabbed his shoulders, probably so she could shove his face into a knee. Before that could happen, he smacked an elbow into her belly and then lunged for her throat when she doubled over, gasping.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck. What we end up doing—” Galahad got to Lancelot at the same time that Gawain and Dagonet got to Guinevere. They managed to keep the pair of them from doing any serious damage, but it took the addition of Tristan on Guinevere and Bors on Lancelot to get the two separated. Which they protested in at least two languages. “Shut the fuck up! Damn it—do you want to lose the war or don’t you?”

“You stupid, stupid, _stupid_ son of a bitch,” Guinevere hissed, completely ignoring Galahad. “Didn’t you hear him?”

Lancelot snarled through a mouthful of blood, which he tried and failed to spit at her. Over his head, Bors rolled his eyes before wrenching Lancelot’s arms a little further up his back. “Hear what? Hear that we’ve both lost him?”

“Yes!” She was almost howling now, face streaked with blood and spit and what looked like tears. “Yes! That, you miserable idiot! He’s never said he would protect land before—only people. He thinks he’s got nothing but his damned duty and that he’s going to die here!”

For the space of a heartbeat, Lancelot didn’t speak. Then he went limp so quickly that Galahad barely grabbed him in time. “So go to him. Talk to him. He loves you, anyway,” he mumbled.

“I can’t. I can’t.” Guinevere was sobbing; embarrassed, the three men on her let go so she staggered under her own power. “You fucking _moron_ , you still don’t—did you mean what you said about not wanting to pile more on him?”

“Of course I did,” Lancelot replied, tone sharpening a little. He shook off Galahad and Bors, still locking gazes with Guinevere. Something seemed to pass between them, and Lancelot stumbled backward a little.

With a last ragged breath, she drew herself up to her full height, and suddenly Guinevere the woman was completely subsumed beneath Guinevere the persona. Even her voice was as smooth and pure as the flat of a fine blade. “Then get out of here and go to him. Keep him alive. And if I ever hear that you’ve hurt him, then it won’t matter whether I’m alive or dead. I will find a way to come after you.”

Lancelot wavered. “Why?”

“Because I love him more than I hate you.” Before she’d even finished speaking, she was turning and going back into the other room. The door shut and the bolts slammed home at the same time that Lancelot finally made for the end of the room.

His first steps were as slow and lopsided as a drunkard’s, but by the time Galahad got into the hallway, Lancelot was running.

“So much for a strategy meeting,” Gawain commented. The dryness in his voice was more likely due to lingering shock than any true black humor. “You think we’re going to lose?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. I don’t even know what we’d be winning or losing now,” Galahad replied.

Tristan snorted and tapped Galahad on the shoulder. “We might as well go back to bed. And—we’re not going to lose.”

For the sake of more than survival, Galahad hoped Tristan knew something he didn’t.

* * *

Exhausted by the effort of finally giving up on Guinevere, Arthur had just touched the edges of a foul slumber when he sensed someone enter his room, but even in his semiconscious state it didn’t take long for him to recognize who it was.

Lancelot stopped at the side of his bed and drew a sharp breath, as if to speak. But he didn’t, and a moment later he was silently crawling up beside Arthur, close enough for his body heat to singe through the blankets wrapped about Arthur. The man didn’t touch Arthur at any place, though his breath stained Arthur’s cheek when he leaned over, probably to see if Arthur was asleep.

Grimly curious, Arthur kept his eyes shut and feigned that state. After what seemed like an endless span of time, the other man laid back and shivered there, not even reaching for any of the blankets.

He would wait for Arthur to acknowledge his presence, and in doing so he would surrender to Arthur’s will, just as he’d said he would. If Arthur could figure out what part of his flawed self was responsible for doing this to people that deserved so much more, he would cut it out without delay.

But he couldn’t. He could barely understand everything that had transpired in between now and Lancelot’s arrival in his life, save for the fact that he had changed enough to want Lancelot somewhere in the chaos that was his life. And he wanted that enough to forgive Lancelot anything, without even a word being said.

Arthur rolled over and retangled the blankets around Lancelot, settling the other man beneath his chin. The body in his arms trembled one last time, then pressed up against him and melted. Lips brushed Arthur’s shoulder and neck before falling away with a sigh.

Only then did Arthur sleep, and though it still was not peaceful, it afforded him some rest.


	5. Chapter 5

Five days ago, the river waters had finally fallen enough to permit a crossing. Three days ago, the first Goths on this side of the mountains had been reported. Two days ago, the last Sarmatian tribe, Tristan’s, had arrived.

Lancelot rolled over and watched the weak dawn light shiver over the bed, humping over ripples and stroking down the length of Arthur’s body. They’d both been up all night, discussing strategy, but after that Arthur had spent an additional few hours feverishly studying the maps. He’d told Lancelot to go to bed, and the redness cobwebbing his eyes had looked so ominous that Lancelot had decided not to argue. He had meant to stay awake till Arthur had come to bed, but sleep had had a treacherously soft touch and had taken over him before he’d realized.

Arthur’s hand pressed against his side, then moved up over his chest. It stayed there for a few tingling, bitter-tasting moments before drifting onto his back. Arthur opened his eyes to reveal them little better than they’d been the previous evening and essayed a fatigued, damnably distant smile. “So you did sleep.”

“No thanks to you. I wanted…” Shaking his head, Lancelot buried his face in the pillow and attempted not to react to the gentle petting. The fingers on his back splayed out and moved in slow circles, rubbing in slow-burning heat that soon spread into his bones, making them soft and bendable to Arthur. So it’d been ever since the night Arthur had accepted his father’s heritage—it’d been that and no more. “If you don’t want me here, you can say so.”

The hand stilled and became a heavy weight on Lancelot’s spine, urging him to sit up and look at the beautiful shell he’d helped hollow out. “What do you think this is?” Arthur asked, tone slightly more strained.

Well, that was better than whatever false calm Arthur had been projecting for the past couple of weeks. When Lancelot had gone to the man and been allowed into Arthur’s bed, the relief and the gratitude had threatened to burst open his skin like water freezing in a too-full skin. He hadn’t expected even that, and so he hadn’t cared that Arthur had showed nothing of his former desperate passion, but only a sad kind of acceptance. But now, after two weeks of Arthur only clinging to him as if to leach the warmth from him, Lancelot needed to know what he’d done. He needed to know whether he’d a chance of keeping Arthur among the living, or whether it was already too late. 

Since he’d thought he’d lost Arthur once already, risking that again shouldn’t be so difficult. Still, it was almost beyond Lancelot to force out the words he knew might send Arthur raging away from him, even if it did end the suffocation of their current limbo. “I think it’s you feeling for Guinevere’s breasts. I think it’s you confusing this with some twisted sense of duty you have. I think it doesn’t matter now who lies in your bed, as long as they’re warm enough to remind you that you aren’t dead yet. I think—Arthur, damn it, I’ll live with her ghost, but I won’t live with yours!”

Lancelot snapped off the last word as quickly as he could and then mashed himself further into the mattress, trying to believe that he could withstand whatever he’d just wrought. The corners of his eyes stung, so he twisted the sheets around his fingers till he started to cut off the blood flow, making them hurt more.

He could hear his own heavy breathing, but he couldn’t hear Arthur’s. Just to make sure, Lancelot strained his hearing as far as he could, but when he still didn’t find any sign of life, he lifted his head to look. And he met a gaze that was violent, boiling green, that threatened to strip the flesh from his bones.

Still on his back, Arthur’s hand curled into a fist, but the other man’s lips seemed to barely move as they delivered a reply seething with half-restrained emotions. “I love Guinevere. If you think I’d betray her lightly, then-- _damn you_.”

Then Lancelot was flipped over and gasping as a mouth devoured his every breath, as hands clawed up and down his body to rake him into a helpless shaking. Palms rasping the skin off of him, dancing sparks down every nerve. Teeth against his, hot tongue sweeping out his moans, and then it was down on his throat and he was reaching for Arthur, only his hands were snatched back down to the bed. As he twisted in an iron grip, a knee pushed past his own and mercilessly ground down on his cock, which was springing to life with a speed that blistered.

“Do you know what it’s like to—” nipping the underside of his chin “—like to just listen to you _breathe_? To hear your heart beating and think—” licking down his chest, brutal pleasure of the knee-pressure suddenly gone “—to think I could take you and take you and you’d cry for more? And to know that I can’t?”

Lancelot pulled and wrenched at his trapped wrists, futilely trying to keep up with the mouth that was incinerating a dividing line down his body. He could feel himself attempting to fall apart according to it, but he whined and whimpered till he managed to yank those errant pieces back. Arthur—such a fast change, and something was wrong with it, and Lancelot needed to know why. He was trying to remember clues and to slot them together, but then Arthur would take a sharp bite, or nuzzle a shiver, and they would all drop away. “Why—why not?”

“Because I don’t know!” As suddenly as he’d begun, Arthur stopped and stared up at Lancelot, face stricken with guilt and confusion and…fear. “I don’t know who I am anymore, or what I’ll do. I thought I did with Guinevere, but I didn’t and so she left. And I can’t…”

It was nearly impossible, but Lancelot managed to ignore the pleading of his prick and recall how to think rationally. He squeezed his eyes shut and threw back his head, but the pillow was too soft to provide the necessary force to knock his thoughts together. “Let go,” he finally muttered.

Arthur did, resignation settling like a shroud over his face. When Lancelot grabbed him and rolled the other man beneath himself, that shroud ripped wide open. That was fortunate, because that spared Lancelot the trouble of punching Arthur. Instead, he clamped his fingers on those broad shoulders, fitting his left thumb around some old scar, and put as much of himself into his eyes as he could. “Arthur. This may surprise you, but I don’t care. Whatever you are, that’s what I follow. Even—even to Rome, if that is where your path goes.”

For a moment, Arthur only stared. His face was frozen and white like the thousand-year snows on the mountain-tops that never melted, and so Lancelot was taken completely unawares by the abrupt shift.

He ended up beneath again, but on his stomach with his hands pinned to the sides again and his legs clumsily sprawling. Arthur, however, was applying his mouth to Lancelot’s nape with such skill that it hardly mattered. One rasp of teeth and shudders fled down Lancelot’s spine; one soft lick and his moan melted his muscles.

It was slower this time, not nearly so frantic, and it felt like Arthur was actually focusing on the flesh writhing beneath him instead of on the turmoil inside him that Lancelot had briefly seen boil over. Lancelot groaned and twisted his head to momentarily catch Arthur’s mouth with his own, but the other man was moving downwards again, nuzzling and kissing his way along Lancelot’s back. He ran across a spear scar that arced over one side of Lancelot’s ribs and spent an inordinate time bringing that ridged, ugly spot to prickling anticipation before tickling the small of Lancelot’s back with featherlight touches of his tongue. Lancelot felt his legs go limp and wide, his wrists surrender to Arthur’s hold and his fingers uncurl to spread over the rumpled blankets.

“You barely know me. A month,” Arthur whispered to the shivering skin of Lancelot’s inner thigh. He tentatively nipped at Lancelot’s right buttock and the light graze stabbed down hurt-edged heat that sent Lancelot’s head lolling on the pillow. Arthur licked over the injured spot, then took a whole mouthful and bit down.

Screaming was hard to do when it seemed like half a pillow had somehow gotten sucked into the mouth. Nevertheless, Lancelot gave it his best shot. He hoped Arthur took that as encouragement, and when the other man demonstrated that he had, it was almost enough for Lancelot to forget himself.

But it was Arthur, after all, and around that man Lancelot never could miss a meaning. Not when every little whisper on the wind seemed to hit Arthur in some way, tipping the balance of his moods toward dark or light. The man thought too much, and what was worse, he made it so Lancelot couldn’t help but think. “I know…I know that you don’t love me.”

Arthur went very still, but his warm breath continued to ghost between Lancelot’s legs. “I don’t know,” he eventually said, voice thick as newly-thawed tree sap.

“It doesn’t matter.” Lancelot struggled with his contrary body until he’d made his hips push back to the point where he could feel Arthur’s lips again, slowly working their way deeper between Lancelot’s thighs. At the first dart of tongue inside, enough of his mind liquefied into hazy drunkenness for him to sink away from the repercussions and fall fully into the simple twist and slide of flesh against flesh. “It doesn’t matter,” he murmured, seeing the first glimmers of blinding white come racing toward him.

And he almost believed himself.

* * *

“I just have to wonder—if I hadn’t forced the issue, would it have been any easier? Would I at least have been spared seeing that son of a whore Sarmatian get him?” Guinevere twiddled her reed-pen in between her fingers and watched the way it blurred from solid stick to little fan-shaped cloud. One side was cracked, and she was getting ink all over her hand, but she didn’t know why she should care. It wasn’t as if her hands were going to stay clean no matter how often she washed them; a trait of her profession, she supposed.

Maybe if she’d been a little more feminine, Arthur would have stopped noticing men—all right, now she was being ridiculous. Even if she was feeling like she’d been walking around for days with her guts cut out, there were limits. She had pride, and knowledge, and skill, none of which had deserted her. In fact, nothing had deserted her except what she had already released, and if she could only remember that…

Merlin was standing up to go. Startled, Guinevere rocked onto her feet and grabbed his arm. “We’re not done yet.”

“And we’ll get no work done while you’re like this. I need to speak with the Sarmatian leaders anyway, so I can come back when you can focus again.” His words would’ve been easy enough to take as cruelty, but his concern-tinged, factual tone made that impossible.

And he was right as well, and Guinevere was disgusting herself with her self-pity. She sat down again and rested her elbows on the table, then rubbed her face with her hands until she thought she’d peeled away some of the dross that had accumulated on her. As a warrior and as a soldier in a hostile land, she should know better than most the dangers of neglecting herself.

As a regretful, angry, frustrated woman who had willingly given up the most honorable, handsome and loving man she’d ever met to a selfish stuck-up bastard, she should know that good swordplay and a large army couldn’t fix everything in the world. People weren’t meant to be alone, witness Arthur. The moment he’d thought he had no one left to stand with him, he’d started to die. And to judge by what Arthur had looked like last night, Lancelot was failing at changing that.

On the one hand, Guinevere wanted Lancelot to be unsuccessful because then she could kill him. On the other…if Lancelot didn’t succeed, then Arthur was gone. Because she’d put herself where she couldn’t help him any more. Not like that, and the realization of that fact made her heart bleed bile.

Oddly enough, Merlin still hadn’t left. Instead, he had come closer and laid his hands on her shoulders, simply waiting for her to look up and see him. When she did, he cupped her cheek as he’d done all through her childhood. “If you had had eight more years and at the end, he had still decided for Sarmatia and Lancelot while you insisted on Britain, would it have hurt less?”

Guinevere wanted to close her eyes, but the calm intensity of Merlin’s gaze wouldn’t permit any such evasions. “No. Maybe more, maybe the same, but not less.”

“So?”

So she hated crying because it reminded her of all that was dark and wrong and lost in the wrong, but when the hot salt rose in her throat and into her eyes, she couldn’t ever fight it. She clutched at Merlin’s arms and buried her face in his shoulder. “I love him. I love him and I gave him up, and—and he still loves me. I could take him from Lancelot.”

“Would you?” Hands that had carved toy swords for little girls that dreamed of battlefields and that had wrenched real ones from entrails stroked her hair.

“No. I can’t kill him. But I—Merlin, how am I supposed to live with this? How?” Her tears were vicious things and always did their best to claw their way out of her eyes, leaving burning scratches on the insides of her eyelids. Guinevere bit down on her lip against the pain and tasted blood mixing into her sobs.

Merlin ran his palm over her hair one last time, then kissed her on the forehead and stepped back, leaving her to sway under her own power. He unrolled the maps and spread them across the table, then switched the broken reed-pen she had still been holding for a fresh one. “It’s been almost five weeks since you told him. Are you dead yet?”

“Is this living?” she asked, squinting up at him.

He simply nodded. “Death is the absence of all feeling. Life _is_ feeling, whether that be good or bad. And Guinevere? I would see the both of you live, or else I would have killed Lancelot myself by now.”

That steadied her enough to lift her head from her hands without feeling as if she were simply retreating into herself and leaving someone else to play Guinevere. She didn’t think she believed his words yet, but she could feel the long years of experience behind them, and she could taste both the acid of despair and the sweetness of hope in that. She…trusted him.

They were simply facts of life, immutable and indestructible. Guinevere was a warrior and a woman and a Briton. Merlin was trustworthy and wise. And Arthur was the man she loved. She’d lived with those pieces of knowledge long enough, and she knew she could do it for longer. If she wanted to be happy, she needed to know that he was, and if he was to be happy…then they had to make a cleaner end of it.

* * *

Tristan had just finished an exhausting, often irritating and especially nasty discussion with what elders were left among his people, and he would have very much liked a warm drink and a soft bed. Unfortunately, Galahad wasn’t around to provide an excuse for seeking that out, and Lancelot looked as if he needed a verbal target. While Tristan wasn’t in the habit of casually sacrificing himself, he was acutely aware of the delicacy of their various positions, and the importance that said positions be maintained.

He did take the time to let his hawk go for a short flight before he dropped himself on the grass besides Lancelot. “If you sharpen that any more, it’ll fall apart.”

“Fuck!” In his surprise, the other man snapped the dagger to which he’d been attending past Tristan’s nose. “Don’t do that!”

A freshly-cut hair fell into Tristan’s lap and he carefully plucked it off his leg before replying. “Throwing it into a wall probably isn’t good for the edge, either.”

Lancelot produced a narrow-eyed glare that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a particularly cranky goat. “I don’t know how Galahad puts up with you. You make an ill-matched pair.”

The peculiarity about Lancelot was that he was capable of such spectacular stupidity that it was easy to forget he was also intelligent, quick-witted and an excellent judge of character, even if he usually chose to disregard his own judgments. Here he hadn’t, and so the remark made Tristan flinch.

The other man ceased glaring and instead, merely scrutinized every inch of Tristan’s face. “How did that happen, anyway? I always thought Galahad would find some girl with good breasts and a better punch.”

“Like his sisters?” Though Tristan hadn’t seen much of the ones that had come with Galahad for the meeting with the Goths, he had had the privilege of seeing one deck Bors for flirting with her.

“Well, upbringing tells.” When Lancelot got up, he was wearing an insolent grin, but by the time he’d retrieved his dagger and come back, the smile was gone. “Does it,” he sighed. “Is excessive fear of oneself part of the Christian doctrine?”

Tristan shrugged and laid back, folding his arms under his head. The sky was a beautiful blue, dotted with fluffy white clouds that were perfectly innocent and a tiny smear of gray that wasn’t—it was the smoke column from the Goth campfires, only a day away. Time was running out, and they still weren’t ready. “I wouldn’t know. Shouldn’t you ask Arthur?”

Instead of answering, the other man looked away and consequently presented Tristan with a tense profile. He worked his jaw, chewing on some unpleasant memory. “You first.”

“I don’t know why Galahad wants me; I only know that he does.” Years of tracking had taught Tristan to look for the signs that others missed, but years of riding through the rolling strife that was life in Sarmatia had also taught him not to question the results he saw. If the trail led to a living or a dead body, then that was what it did, and all the wishing in the world couldn’t change that. If someone else decided for good to do what they pleased, then Tristan could do nothing there, either.

And if some pretty, short-tempered, stubborn horseman with a surprising gift for unconscious practicality decided he wouldn’t mind snoring into Tristan’s ear, then…then he was glad. “And I know that I want him. That slaughter was in the dark; I remember that blackness sometimes, but when the light comes back Galahad’s always there. I don’t understand it, but I know it.”

“You remember he’s an ass, right? Been like that ever since he was seven, so I don’t think he’ll change.” The expression on Lancelot’s face was composed of a little surprise laced through a lot of grudging understanding, and his eyes were mostly looking through Tristan. Or looking inside himself. Either way, the conversation was beginning to double up on itself.

“He says the same about you.” Tristan waited till Lancelot had directed his glare elsewhere, then sat up and grinned at his hands. “I know. He’s annoying. But after the battle I’m still leaving my tribe for his—and that probably is why he isn’t around right now. He thinks that means he owes me something.”

Lancelot snorted and began picking at the grass, quickly staining his fingers with green. He noticed and started to wipe hands on his knees, then stopped and stared at the smudges. At first, Tristan didn’t see it, but then he remembered the odd shade of Arthur’s eyes, very unlike the brown that predominated in Sarmatia, and compared it to the color of the grass stains. Identical. “It’s not easy.”

“You make it look that way,” the other man muttered with sudden savagery. “Sometimes I’ve got to wonder if you actually _feel_ anything. You’re like the stone icicles in the caves.”

Normally that wouldn’t have offended Tristan because he’d always known he didn’t react in quite the same way as most other people, and he’d grown old enough to not care because that was just one of those things that was beyond his control. But as it was Lancelot, Tristan did feel his hackles begin to rise. “If it were simple to suddenly give up everything I’ve ever known for something that I’ve barely begun to know, I might not have waited so long to do that. But if I hadn’t waited, then it wouldn’t have been something worth waiting for.”

“But that doesn’t make—” The sense visibly hit Lancelot, somewhere low in the stomach so his mouth opened in a silent gasp. He gave Tristan another sharp look. “I hate waiting.”

“Everyone knows that.” Someone was coming up the hill; Tristan closed his eyes and listened for the peculiarities of the person’s gait. “Does Arthur?”

It took even less time for Lancelot to understand the point of that. Although Tristan was expecting another angry retort, the other man surprised him by only sighing. “At least you trust who you’re going to. I don’t think Arthur sees me as anything but the last wedge between him and Guinevere.”

“No, Tristan doesn’t. Not enough to tell me what he’s doing,” Galahad snapped from behind them. He thumped down in front of Tristan and folded his arms across Tristan’s knees. “You stupid bastard.”

“I did tell you.” Up in the sky, a tiny dot was whirling into view, dropping down till it resolved into a pair of upswept wings.

While Lancelot tried and failed to hide his snickering, Galahad glowered like an upset pregnant mare. “And I told you to wait!”

“Till when? Till we knew whether we were going to live past the battle?” Tristan raised his eyebrow, then abruptly parted his knees so Galahad lost his support and promptly fell forward, jabbing his nose into Tristan’s stomach. Before the other man could get his mouth unblocked and therefore could speak, Tristan put his hand on top of Galahad’s head and held him there. “Which battle? Because there’ll always be one.”

Muffled grunting and fists smacking into Tristan’s hips.

“Because I wanted to,” Tristan replied. “Why’d you invite me to share your tent while we were waiting for my tribe? And don’t say it’s because I was less likely to have attacks there, or that it’s easier to have privacy there than in Arthur’s room. Those are truths, but not reasons.”

When he let the other man up, Galahad slowly slouched his way to facing Tristan, annoyed and reluctantly pleased with just a trace of tenderness. “All right, maybe I like you. Sometimes.”

And then Galahad toppled Tristan back into a fierce kiss that knocked the wind out of Tristan before feeding it back to him, warmed and spiced. Somewhere on the side, Lancelot was getting up and leaving, dropping a last insult behind him as a farewell. A moment later, a soft flutter and an even softer cry signaled the return of Tristan’s hawk. He squirmed out his arm and groped for her. “Galahad—get off.”

“Fine, but hurry up. You took forever in that damned meeting.” The other man did as he was told, but only until he could try to drag Tristan along. “Come _on_.”

“We’ve a day and a night,” Tristan observed, picking up his pace a little. He lightly scratched his hawk on the head, then glanced back up at the smoke-column. It had thickened ever-so-slightly; the Goths were making camp for the night and building up their fires. For the scouts, finding the camp wasn’t going to be difficult at all.

Galahad squeezed Tristan’s arm, then let go and determinedly looked straight ahead. “No, we’ve got an afternoon. You’re going out tonight, aren’t you?”

Tristan felt the need for an answer, but he didn’t have one he thought Galahad would accept.

“Just try not to get yourself killed. Considering you’ve gone through so much trouble and…” The muscle in Galahad’s cheek twitched, and he curled his hands into fists. “…hurry up.”

* * *

Though they all behaved reasonably well when duties necessitated that they be in the same room, it was still a relief for Arthur when Lancelot stepped out for a moment. Not much of one, given that the man gave him a glance that was full of resigned, bitter longing and gave Guinevere one that was brimming with hostility, but Arthur was thankful for any slackening of tension that he had.

It was only a brief let-up, for as soon as Lancelot was gone there was Guinevere, shoulders shaking a little as she checked over the plans one last time. “So the garrison will look as if we’ve abandoned it to the Sarmatians, who’ll draw up outside to lure the Goths close to the walls. Then our cavalry and our infantry will fall on the rear. Entire effect being to surround the Goths.”

“Do you see any possible flaws?” Of course there were, but both of them knew that with their limited numbers, nothing could be done about those. When the moment came, it’d be as much luck and sheer leadership on the part of the officers as strategy. Arthur hoped he’d be able to reverse the current trends in those, but he wasn’t certain of it.

Instead of directly answering him, she came around the side of the table and lifted his chin with her hand. He caught his breath, then savored the missed touch.

Guinevere, however, remained still as stone. “Do you love him?”

Arthur’s eyes had drifted shut, and when he opened them now, it was to find a strange kind of grief in her face: pain, but aged so that it had become a part of her instead of overwhelming all of her. She put her other hand to his cheek and smiled a little, sad crescent shining in the failing twilight that filtered through the shutters. “Arthur, we won’t wait for each other. Whether that was hurried by the decisions we both made—it doesn’t matter. It still remains a fact.”

“He says that it doesn’t matter about many things, but I can see that it does. I…bruise him, I think.” As slowly as he could, Arthur reached up and pulled Guinevere’s hands down. He looked at them, remembering the feeling of her knuckles beneath his lips, the making of each tiny scar. “I would rather not, but…old habits are hard to break. Just listening to him breathe…but doing more feels like I’m betraying you. And that in turn betrays him.”

Guinevere drew a shuddering sigh and wrapped her fingers around Arthur’s. “I can’t forgive you because there’s nothing to forgive. I wish there were—I wish I could hate, but I can’t. I can still give you that much.”

Then she bent down and whispered to his lips, “Love me.”

That kiss was full of sweetness and beauty, flavor sharpened by the recollection of shared troubles. Drawing apart tore at something deep inside Arthur, snapping loose strings and destroying every remaining particle. He dragged in air and felt it burn his lungs.

“And leave me.” She kissed him a second time, and he tasted earth and ashes with just a trace of brightness. But lives couldn’t be built on traces, so Arthur let her go.

He couldn’t yet look at her with equanimity, so he turned away and stared at the maps. They were nothing more than a collection of lines and dots, arbitrarily assigned meanings, but they were still capable of leading men out of the wilderness as long as they stayed fixed. Where he was, the lines had shifted, or the meanings had changed, and so all the knowledge was lost to him. But people depended on him, and so he had to start again, seek a third life in Sarmatia. Perhaps it would fail, like Britain and Rome had, but perhaps steppes were broad enough to encompass everything, and black curls twined in his fingers tight enough to hold him together.

“You were right,” Arthur said, staring at the lamp flame in the corner. “Lancelot was someone to worry about from the moment I pulled him out of that horror.”

“It was your face.” Guinevere leaned against the table, moving it a little with her shrug. “You looked at that massacre as if every speck of it had been branded on you. That’s what I feel about Britain, and that’s what you feel about Sarmatia.”

A breeze fingered Arthur’s hair, and then she was slipping out the door while Lancelot, expression guarded, came in. His footsteps came up to Arthur’s side and the warmth of a palm held a hairsbreadth away hovered over Arthur’s shoulder.

He hissed a little when Arthur grabbed that hand, but seemed to stop breathing when Arthur pulled him towards the chair, making their knees bump. “The…the others see no problems,” Lancelot muttered, teeth grinding on the tail-end of each word. “They want to know where you’ll be.”

“With the Sarmatian cavalry. That’s what I grew up in.” Arthur allowed a laugh to trickle out as he caught Lancelot’s other wrist and stroked the soft skin of its inside with his thumb. He pressed down on the resulting shiver, searching for and finding the pulse. “I should have seen this coming, but men aren’t so far-sighted as we’d like to think…”

“Arthur?” The other man sounded worried; he tried to tug his hands toward Arthur’s face.

And love, Arthur thought, was not the greatest certainty after all, but the greatest uncertainty. He might die tomorrow, he might not, but in any case, what he left behind him would live on. That was a better argument against doing regrettable things than any promise of eternal punishment that would only affect him.

He looked up, caught Lancelot’s confused gaze with his own, and pulled the other man on top of him. The chair creaked a bit, but it had sustained such things before and it would continue to do so. “It may not matter to you, but it does to me. When I look at you, I don’t see Guinevere. And to be honest, that frightens me because I haven’t lived like that in a long time. But…”

“But?” Lancelot looked dazed, pupils huge enough to swallow the encroaching darkness.

“But it seems that I can let her leave. And I don’t think I can do that with you.” Arthur spread the fingers of Lancelot’s hand with his own, memorizing the way they flexed and bent, the length and the breadth of them. He licked at the hollow of the palm, then followed the taste of salt up the middle finger. “I have no idea what this says about either of you. I only know that if you ever try to leave--”

He was interrupted by a hard, fierce kiss that slowly segued into a surprising tenderness. Lips trailed down the side of Arthur’s face to press against his jaw, then against the spot beneath his ear. “I won’t leave. I won’t.”

The fingers slipped out of Arthur’s hands and fell to his shoulders, lifting only for the few seconds it took for Arthur to rid Lancelot of his clothing. Thumbs brushed his neck, dragged over his collarbone and dug down when Arthur ran a nail down Lancelot’s spine. Beautiful bending flesh, chin lifting to offer throat, and of course Arthur bent forward to nibble down that. His hands rippled sweat up and down the lean back, occasionally stopping to count ribs that were beginning to heave under quick, shallow breaths.

Soft kiss to his temple, and then a face pressed into the side of his neck, like when they’d first met. No blood, though—not on the outside. “You still don’t love me,” Lancelot whispered.

Arthur feathered his fingers over the other man’s hips, drawing out shiver after shiver, then cupped one and lifted Lancelot so he could get off his clothes. “Not like I do Guinevere.”

“That’s not a no.” Startled, Lancelot straightened up and stared down at Arthur. His hands slipped inside Arthur’s loosened clothing and pressed flat against Arthur’s chest, though whether that was to keep distance or to obtain more contact was impossible to tell.

There was an unlighted lamp on the windowsill that yielded enough oil, though Arthur had to break it open. Lancelot didn’t even flinch at the noise, or give any sign that he’d noticed.

“I want to watch you live and breathe and laugh. I want to always know where you are, to taste you in my mouth and myself on your skin—no one else.” Very carefully, Arthur slid his oiled hand between Lancelot’s buttocks and slipped just the tip of his finger into the other man. When Lancelot twitched and whimpered, Arthur swept his other hand up Lancelot’s chest, quieting him. “I want to know that you’re first mine and second anything else. That’s…I don’t know what that is, because I’ve never felt it before.”

“That doesn’t matter, and when I say that this time, I mean it.” Lancelot suddenly shoved himself down. His nails ripped into Arthur and his mouth opened as wide as his eyes already were. Air went in and out of him in ragged pants, but a moment later he was rolling his hips, tentatively starting to fuck himself on the finger. It was obscene and beautiful and irresistible, and when Arthur slid in two more, Lancelot whined and tried to spread his knees in the cramped space. “That’s what I wanted. Anything else—anything else I’ll have time to get.”

Confident, maybe a touch arrogant, but when Arthur only stroked a knuckle down Lancelot’s cheek, the other man pressed into the caress with such eagerness that it almost hurt to watch. “You’re sounding more like yourself. And you’ve done this before.”

“Not in a chair. And not—” Lancelot groaned as Arthur twisted the fingers inside “—I can’t even look at anyone besides you now. I don’t dare—you’re barely here as it is—and if I blink, I think I’ll miss something—”

Hands petted their way down Arthur, frequently seizing up and clenching as he continued to work out where Lancelot’s sensitive spots were. Eventually they reached his cock and fumbled it out; Lancelot shuffled forward and raked an open-mouthed kiss over Arthur’s lips, then grabbed the back of the chair and hauled himself up. His legs were badly trembling, so Arthur took him by the waist and helped.

For a moment, they were both beyond aid, simply pressed together and trading heated breath and trying to remember how to move. Lancelot’s head dropped to Arthur’s shoulder again, and his hands seemed frozen to the chair. “If you die tomorrow, I won’t see sunset. And don’t try to tell me not to do it.”

Arthur couldn’t answer that with anything but lips and tongue and hands. He licked the curve of Lancelot’s neck and shoulder clean while his hands splayed out over Lancelot’s thighs and started to move them. After a moment, the other man jerked in the hold and took over, so Arthur dragged his fingers around to wrap around Lancelot’s prick, stroking from tip to base with an occasional straying beyond. He remembered the morning and lightly scratched at the bite marks from that.

Lancelot whimpered, soft little strangled cries in his throat, and increased the pace till Arthur thought they should be burning off skin. When Arthur was thinking at all, because that ability was fast slipping away. And then Lancelot plunged himself down one last time and stiffened. He came with a long, low moan and tensed so tightly around Arthur that it was impossible not to follow suit.

“We never know what happens tomorrow,” Arthur muttered, watching the black spots clear from his vision. He wrapped his arms around Lancelot and buried his face in the other man’s hair.

“Then whatever this was, I’m grateful it happened tonight.” After a few scattered kisses, Lancelot nuzzled the side of Arthur’s face and slowly eased himself off. He collapsed back on Arthur and stayed that way, even when they eventually shifted to the bed in the next room. The last thing Arthur remembered before sleep took him was the slowing of Lancelot’s breathing as the other man chased dreams.

* * *

This was the first time Galahad had worn full armor since before the massacre, and he’d forgotten how damned heavy it was. His shoulders were already hurting, and his horse fidgeted whenever he took an eye off it. “Stupid son of a bitch.”

Beside him, Dagonet sat as still and solid as a mountain. “He’ll come.”

“I was talking to my horse, who’s right here.” Annoyed as he was, Galahad kept his voice down so Lancelot wouldn’t hear and start teasing. In point of fact, the other man didn’t really look as if he were in the mood for teasing, but since Galahad couldn’t identify what mood would make him shift his weight, wince-smile and then go deadly serious, it was easier just to assume he’d be bitchy as usual.

Dagonet’s face remained set in its non-expression, though he did unbend enough to point. “There’s the scouts.”

One rider separated from the approaching group to loop over to Tristan’s tribe, and then it detoured to trot up to Galahad while the other scouts went to report to Arthur. Bors hailed the errant rider first: “How many did you kill?”

Uncaring shrug. “Four,” Tristan answered, casually flicking at some dried blood on his arm.

“Good start to the day,” Bors grinned, dropping back.

Now that Tristan was near enough to be recognized, Galahad could see that the man was strangely relaxed for someone that’d spent the whole night skulking around an enemy camp and now had a full-scale battle to look forward to. Then again, four Goths. And it _was_ Tristan, who was improbable and contradictory and who liked curling up to Galahad’s left side.

Galahad shuffled through his confused thoughts for a moment, then gave up. “You’re back,” he said, inane as a drooling baby, as Tristan turned his horse to come up beside Galahad. “Any…problems?”

“No. It doesn’t happen when I’m tracking.” Tristan was murmuring to his hawk, petting it one last time before he set it aloft. His eyes were rimmed with dark circles, but he looked more than awake enough for a long battle.

“Well, you did say all you needed was to get out again.” The Goths had spotted the Sarmatian forces outside an apparently abandoned garrison, and they were now pouring down into the other side of the field, eager to deal with what they assumed were leaderless horsemen. Arthur had had rumors spread among them to the effect that the Romans were too terrified to fight and were withdrawing, so they wouldn’t bother detaching an army to go look for the missing Briton vexillations. They’d just try to crush the Sarmatians.

To judge by the numbers that were forming up before them, they’d believed the lies. Galahad tried to make an estimate and couldn’t due to the amount of dust that was being kicked up, so he glanced at the cavalry arrayed behind and went over those numbers. Which was a bad idea that didn’t reassure him at all.

“That wasn’t all I needed,” Tristan admitted, very soft and oddly shy. He threw his hawk up in the air, and as it rose, the shouts of his people seemed to blow it even higher. Against that uproar, his voice was like a single white hair in a black horse’s coat, but Galahad nevertheless had no trouble hearing it. “In their language, the Britons call the river Cam, and this field Camlann.”

“So?” Galahad asked, a little more gently than he usually would. His horse nervously tossed its head and neighed, pawing at the ground, but when Tristan reached over and stroked its neck, it calmed. Watching his long fingers move in rhythmic motions over the horse was soothing to Galahad as well, and he relaxed a bit.

The other man shrugged. “Might be a good thing to remember for…afterward.”

“They will tell stories of this day,” Dagonet suddenly said, the depth of his voice making them all jump.

Recovering, Bors elbowed the man, a grin trying desperately to stay in place on his face. “And what story would you want them to tell of you?”

“That I fought well. That I remembered myself to my forefathers. I need little else.” The man clammed up again, with only a glint of some close-held memory in his eyes. 

Galahad wondered who had died to make Dagonet so, and then he shook off the thought. Deaths did what they would to men’s lives, but the living went on in spite of themselves. Grass grew on graves. Days passed. “Tristan? If I fall, my sister will still take you. If you want.”

The hand caressing Galahad’s horse stilled. “You didn’t mention this before.”

“So we’re even.” Smirking strained the tense muscles in Galahad’s face, but only for a moment. Then, shaking his head, Tristan smacked Galahad in the side of the head and sat back in the saddle, grinning a little himself. “What?”

“You’re hopeless.” Tristan rolled his shoulders, working out the kinks, and then straightened up. Arthur was coming.

Arthur was, curiously enough, not wearing the armor of a Roman officer. At least, not all of it: the majority was the finest Sarmatian armor Galahad had ever seen. The red cloak Arthur had kept, and some trick of the light made it shimmer around the edges as he stood up in his stirrups. “Knights!”

He was speaking Sarmatian as well, which Galahad had heard him do only a handful of times; even with them, he’d tended to use the rough, messy Latin that had been adopted by the higher-ranking Sarmatians as a trading language. “I am wearing my father’s armor,” Arthur continued. “Because he was a Sarmatian knight—born in Britain, but his spirit was always here. My road to this place was not as clear as his was to him, but I have found it, and followed it, and I will not abandon it. Briton, Roman, Sarmatian—it doesn’t matter. We all face one enemy today. Remember that! Fight for your land, for yourselves, for your children. Fight!”

The roar of approval that greeted his words was loud enough to make Galahad cringe. He dimly heard Gawain commenting to Lancelot: “If he speaks like that in bed, then I can understand why you ended up there.”

Lancelot’s reply was terse and deliberate. “Gawain, if you survive the battle, I’m going to string your guts from the nearest standard.”

Before the conversation could go any further, Arthur was wheeling about to edge his horse in between the two of them. He glanced at Lancelot, and though Galahad only caught the edge of that, its sheer intensity still managed to make him feel as if he’d been burned. Rubbing at the side of his face, he turned his horse away and made for his contingent. A flicker of the periphery of his vision was Tristan raising a hand; Galahad briefly lifted his own, then kicked his horse into a trot. The battle was starting.

* * *

High up in the rocky hills surrounding the field, Guinevere kept her hands firmly pressed to her saddle so she wouldn’t bite her nails. The cavalry she led was lightly armored and so it was somewhat easier to hide it in the scrubby foliage, both natural and hastily-constructed artificial, than it would have been to hide the Sarmatians. Still, the infantry secreted into turf-covered ditches below probably was having the easiest time of it. If any of this could be called easy.

She watched the two armies draw up, Goths already shrilling their haunting warcries, Sarmatians ringing the far end of the field in a vast but thin line. That was a studied effect: the Sarmatians were supposed to break the Goth infantry line anyway, so there was no point in stacking them too close together. Tight formations weren’t possible with cavalry the way they were with infantry, as a horse needed at least three feet on either side to run free.

It was a matter of timing. If the Sarmatians did as they should, then they could join with the Britons and fall on the Goth rear at their leisure, trapping the enemy up against the walls of the garrison. If they didn’t, then Arthur had a divided army and disaster became imminent.

“Sir, they’re starting,” quietly called the look-out.

Guinevere nodded and peered at the Goth lines, watching the archers step out front. She didn’t need to hear the sounds to know that they were stringing their bows, fitting arrows to strings—

From the Sarmatian lines came a scattered volley of arrows that zipped _over_ the archers to decimate the waiting infantry and cavalry, which had thought themselves safely out of range. A faint howl of outrage could be heard, which made Guinevere grin as she patted her own Sarmatian bow, and then the archers were hurrying to avenge their comrades. Which was when the artillery Merlin had so patiently dragged into the hills proved its worth. Huge rocks, plentiful in Sarmatia, and gigantic iron arrows rained down on the Goths.

When the Goth volley was finally released, it was enormous but ill-aimed; the majority of the arrows went askew and missed the Sarmatians, who by then were charging forward. Some of them still hit home because Guinevere could see bodies littering the wake of the galloping horses, but thankfully that number was low.

Having no choice but to go forward, the Goths advanced at a run. No doubt they were hoping to break through the Sarmatian lines quickly enough to fall on the rear en masse, or at least force the knights into a space too small for maneuvering. Guinevere found herself anxiously scanning the field for one particular cloak, and once she’d spotted it, she found herself muttering a childhood prayer.

“If the gods of Britain even know where this is,” she snorted. Arthur would be fine. He’d survived dozens of battles, and even if she—even if she wasn’t by his side now, he wasn’t a cripple. Lancelot was, if nothing else, an excellent fighter that she had to admit probably would’ve won their fight if the other knights hadn’t intervened, and she couldn’t doubt the depth of his attachment to Arthur.

The Sarmatian line resisted the first Goth onslaught, and then it fragmented into smaller groups that systematically slashed their way through the Goth lines. It sounded like the wind was mortally wounded and screaming in agony.

“Sir, they’re through!”

“Then we go.” Guinevere grabbed the reins with one hand, her bow with the other, and sent her horse skittering down the hillside.

They came at the dusty, bloodsoaked mess from the sides, diving in to pepper the Goths with spears and arrows, then wheeling back before their opponents’ futile lunges. Guinevere pulled arrows from her quiver, balanced against the movement of the horse and shot in one continuous motion, doing that till her arms ached with the strain. She watched most of her arrows disappear into the dirt clouds, having to trust in her gut feeling that they were striking home in Goth bodies.

Occasionally the dust would clear a little, and she would catch a glimpse of the close fighting. A knight being piked out of the saddle. Two Goths going under a rampaging charger, its red-painted hooves clawing the air. The silent one—Dagonet—grabbing some young Briton, barely of age to fight, onto his horse moments before a battleaxe would’ve cleaved his head. Arthur going head-to-head with a Goth cavalryman and cutting the man nearly in two with Excalibur, and then Lancelot coming up from behind so his horse trampled the fallen corpse.

Eerie shrieks signaled that the Briton infantry had joined the fighting. As she came in for another pass, Guinevere could see that they were forcing the Goths back, pinning them against the garrison, but it was too slow. The first panic engendered by the surprise flank and rear attacks was wearing off quicker than they’d anticipated, and the Goths were rallying. There were still too many damned Germans on their feet, and the Sarmatians were getting stuck in them; if they mounted a counterattack now, then Arthur would have difficulty in pulling together a defense.

Guinevere sent her soldiers back to harry the Goths and keep them penned in, then rode in as close as she dared, searching for the Goth leaders. Standard rule of warfare: strike the head and the body will perish. While it hadn’t worked when the Goths had slaughtered the Sarmatian chiefs, Guinevere doubted that the other side had any equivalent of Arthur that could wield together the remaining fragments.

As was to be expected, the apparent Goth commander was the tallest hulk of furs and armor in the fighting, his axe and sword sweeping blood and brains in a wide circle around him. Guinevere ducked a stray spear and drew her bow, sighting his left eye.

Something cannonaded into her horse, sending it thrashing over with a scream. Cursing, Guinevere felt her arrow go askew and miss, but there wasn’t time for another try. She kicked her feet loose of the stirrups and leaped free just as two more pikes found their way into her poor horse. “Fucking bastards.”

The Goths had no idea what she was saying. It didn’t matter; a moment later, her daggers were in their throats and her sword was out, blocking an overhand slice while she lashed out with her boot. Balls crunched, her new attacker screamed and fell over, and she backhanded her sword into his skull to put him out of his misery. Then she looked for her bow, but it had been snapped in two. The hard way, then.

By now, most of the Sarmatians had had to dismount and were fighting alongside the Briton infantry. All of the Goth cavalry had been taken care of, so the battle had been reduced to who could kill the fastest.

An eddy in the fighting near her let Guinevere pass almost to the center before someone challenged her again. The Goth feinted with his sword, then cut at her right thigh. She twisted aside and caught her left ribs on some idiot’s spear—only sliced through the buckles there and caught on her armor, but it still pinned her for a moment. With a heave, she wrenched herself free of her trapped corselet and grabbed the spear haft, diverting it into the first Goth’s face. While the spearman gaped at his screaming, staggering comrade, she drove her sword into the side of his neck. Yanking it free and swinging around blocked another attacker, and she was getting ready to engage with him when he seemed to split down the middle in a welter of blood.

Dagonet stepped through the cleaved body and went past without even a word to her, charging a Goth with distinctive red hair. He shouted something and whirled his ax above his head.

“What the fuck are you doing here? And where’s your armor?” Lancelot suddenly dove in and dealt with a man behind her in two strokes.

“Armor’s too restraining when you’re not on a horse,” she flung back as she whipped out the garrote she always kept. Some Goth lunged at Lancelot’s from the side and she leaped onto the German’s back, threw the loop around his neck and used his choking struggles to break his neck. Guinevere agilely slid free of his death throes and retrieved her sword. “Where’s Arthur?”

Before Lancelot could answer, Dagonet howled again. The sea of bloody hacking parted just long enough for them to see him, spears and at least one sword sticking out from his body, bury his ax in some Goth and collapse over the handle. Lancelot swore, then ducked a sword and slashed so hard that his opponent’s head nearly fell off. “He just said he’d avenged his father and mother.”

“Kill now, grieve later.” She darted past him and cut down another Goth, twisting and stabbing till she caught sight of the Goth leader again. He was being baited by Galahad and Tristan, but the latter was too slow in dodging a thrust and fell back. Likewise, Galahad moved to cover him and left the ground free for—“Arthur!”

“Damn it, duck!” Lancelot shoved her aside just in time for them to both miss the edge of a huge blade, wielded by an even bigger Goth. “Fuck. They do breed them large.”

Guinevere shrugged and dropped her garrote to take her sword with both hands. “That’s only an advantage in bed.”

She feinted and drove in low, then whirled back to see a long red streak seep through the man’s furs. Laughing, Lancelot danced around the other side and blocked the blade, then swept his other sword around to slash the Goth’s arm. “You know, sometimes I think I might’ve liked you. Under different circumstances.”

“Maybe. But I wasn’t saying mere words when I said I’d kill you. If you made him unhappy.” Someone crashed into her and she stabbed him off, but that sent her too close to the Goth’s sword and she came away with a burning cut across her abdomen that suddenly made her wish she’d manage to keep her armor. But wishes were nothing in war; she let her anger rise and rushed in to press him against Lancelot’s swords. The Goth clawed the air as he went down, gurgling all the way.

“I don’t make him unhappy,” Lancelot hissed, fierce and wounded all at once. Not hurt because of her, but because of—it was both pleasing and upsetting to hear that Arthur wasn’t yet free of her. “Not that.”

Guinevere swallowed hard and remembered that Arthur might be dying right now, spitted on some worthless Goth’s sword. Dying in his ancestors’ land, in the land that he’d at last taken for his own, in the land that wasn’t hers. She bowed her head so Lancelot wouldn’t see her tears.

Something thudded into her unprotected side and she lurched away with a gasp, then reflexively cut down with her sword. The Goth, finally dead, fell away. So did his blade, freshly-coated with blood.

A hand grabbed her elbow and held her up when the pain hit, so hard that she nearly stopped breathing. “Guinevere?”

She shoved Lancelot away and forced back the threatening haze. The fighting around them was dying down as the Goths turned horrified faces to the body at their feet; their opponent must have been an important man. Not yet, she pleaded. Not till Britain. Not till the fresh, moist, leafy green she saw on the horizon was nearer. “Make him happy. He’s…he’s too good to lose. You hear me? Make him happy.”

“Guinevere—fuck. Fuck!” Hands pushed aside hers and brushed against the wound, then flew away as Lancelot turned to deal with someone. Without his support, she stumbled, then fell to her knees.

Guinevere wanted to keep fighting. She wanted to, but the sword was so heavy and her vision was clouding with so much green that she could hardly see the fighting. There were tree trunks, their girth and height like nothing she’d ever seen in Sarmatia, and the whisper of coolness settling into her bones.

But—but no Arthur. She felt that absence like a reopened scar, new and old hurt mingling into agony, and she fought it, trying to stay away a little longer.

* * *

Made wary by the massacre, the Sarmatians had been ferociously protective of their new leaders, and so nearly all of the knights that Arthur had saved had survived the battle. Dagonet hadn’t, but he had cut down two Goth chiefs before he had died. Gawain and Galahad were still capable of riding; Tristan could barely stand, but to Merlin’s eye, the man would survive. Bors would certainly go on to father more children besides the one growing in Vanora’s belly, and Lancelot…

Merlin had lost track of that one during the fighting when he’d turned to check that Guinevere’s cavalry, being too lightly armored, was staying well clear of the main fighting and had found that she was nowhere to be seen. The girl never could stay away from the thick of it. Usually she came out with honors, but something in Merlin’s gut made him hurry through the field of dead and dying.

He came across Arthur first: the man was kneeling beside the enormous corpse of what Merlin presumed had been the Goth commander-in-chief. Arthur had his hand to his side, which was slowly trickling blood, but no red coated his lips and so Merlin judged that the man wasn’t fatally wounded. “Sir.”

“We won,” Arthur breathed, neither triumphant nor dejected. He seemed in shock, which guess was further borne out by his lack of flinching when Merlin helped him up. “Where’s…oh, God.”

Fear animated Arthur’s face, flushing it full of life and just as quickly draining it away. Then he was rushing through the maze of groaning and still bodies, desperate worry giving him speed and nimbleness that Merlin, far less wounded, couldn’t match.

Merlin saw Lancelot’s head first as the other man half-rose to meet Arthur, who ignored him and dropped down beside the body. And then Merlin saw that body’s face, and he felt his heart swell against his ribs, trying to break them with grief. Too much blood…

Arthur bent down and took Guinevere’s head in his hands, pressing their foreheads together. Her fingers, already white as bone, limply grazed against his cheek. “Burn me,” she whispered as Merlin fell to his knees on her other side. “I want to be taken to Britain, and the body won’t last…”

“Your people—they think burning’s not—not right—” Arthur could barely speak.

“Did I ever care? I took up with you, after all. Roman.” She choked and coughed, spitting blood into Arthur’s face, but he didn’t even flinch. Her hand slid back to the ground, and her voice grew so weak that Merlin could just make out the words. “I wanted to marry you. I wanted to see Britain. I’m sorry the one meant more than the other to me.”

Shaking his head, Arthur mumbled something about it not mattering. Then he drew away enough to see the life drain from her eyes, and a shudder ripped through him. Probably thinking Arthur was about to collapse, Lancelot reached for him, but Arthur threw back his head and keened.

It was a high, soaring, lingering cry that shivered the spirit and raked it raw to the cold winds. Merlin bowed his head beneath its sorrow and closed his girl’s eyes with a trembling hand, suddenly feeling every year of his life.

“So he’s still got enough Briton in him to do that,” muttered a passing soldier.

Snarling, Lancelot whipped around and reached for the nearest crossbow, but Merlin got to it first. He held the other man back and glared at the fool Briton until he was sure he’d planted the nightmare too deep in that man to be rooted out. “If I ever hear you speak about Arthur again, my curse will eat you alive and shrivel the bones of all your children and your children’s children.”

Behind them, Arthur continued to mourn.


	6. Epilogue

Maximus shrugged and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, fingers tapping on the box sitting on the table before him. “You…did an excellent job of shaming us to the point where we couldn’t _not_ act, Arthur. Though to be honest, we made it exceedingly easy for you.”

“I wasn’t expecting to live long enough to have this meeting.” Arthur scribbled his signature to the last sheet of parchment and handed it over. As he did, he noticed with some dull amusement that the other man couldn’t help but stare, which wasn’t entirely incomprehensible. Less than a week had passed since the battle of Camlann, and though Arthur wasn’t a vain man, the gauntness of his reflection frightened even himself. “That letter was a last protest before I went out and died on the battlefield.”

“But you didn’t.” Of all the other garrison commandants in Sarmatia, Maximus was the most honorable and least foolish, but with that went a very shallow interpretation of the notion of duty. He followed his orders to the letter and was loath to look beyond that.

One of the cuts on Arthur’s arm was beginning to throb; he shifted its bandage just enough to alleviate the pressure, but not enough to shift whatever poultice Merlin had bound onto it. “No. Awkward, I suppose.”

On the other hand, Maximus had turned himself around and brought his army up to Arthur’s post just in time to help tend the wounded, and with not a single official order in sight. And now he was sitting in Arthur’s rooms, taking Arthur’s report for personal transportation to the nearest high official. “I…they can’t touch you for a victory, even if that was accomplished by a blatant disobeying of orders. Not formally. And you’re fortunate that that command to withdrawal came from a governor that’s now fallen from the favor of the emperor. But yes, it is awkward.”

“My retirement’s been postponed long enough, I think.” Arthur folded his hands in his lap and stared out the window, watching the sunlight filter down from an overcast sky. It was weak and anemic, sapping his already abused spirit, and so he turned away to face Maximus. “I don’t think they would mind refusing me my discharge.”

“I was hoping you’d ask for that.” With a deft twist of his fingers, Maximus flipped open his box to reveal that it was full of neat little scrolls. He picked out one whose handles were notably more elaborate and passed it to Arthur. “There’s about a half dozen more, stowed with my gear. Just about all of your men are due, aren’t they?”

In truth, about half had a couple more years to go, but Arthur was hardly going to argue the point. “They’re being allowed home?”

“The Empire believes that the presence of a large group of Britons, who’ve been indoctrinated in the Roman way of life for generations, might help ease tensions in Britain.” Maximus settled back in his seat, clearly relieved at the direction of the conversation. “An army’s rampaging through Germania right now, and it looks as if we might finally deal with those barbarians once and for all. Until that’s certain, I’m to take over this garrison and hold it, but afterwards Rome is withdrawing from Sarmatia for good.”

“Nothing here to guard except the border, which is going to disappear. Is that what they’re thinking?” Arthur unrolled the scroll just enough to glimpse the words and see that they were the right ones, then rolled it back up again. He didn’t need to choke himself on the false platitudes he knew were inside, nor did he need the reassurance of pretty lettering to know that he was a man of free will, able to choose as he would. The responsibility behind that freedom had already left too many scars on him and in him for him not to believe in it.

After a moment of strained silence, Maximus sat up and made to leave. “Well, I’ll have the discharges transferred to you and let you get on with wrapping up your term of service.”

He started to go, then turned back with a curious look on his face. “Arthur? Where are you going after this?”

“Nowhere,” Arthur replied. When he saw the worry steal into Maximus’ face, he smiled as best he could and shook his head. “No, I won’t be around to get in your way. But…I’ve found that I’ve an affinity with Sarmatia. A day’s riding and a man can utterly lose himself here.”

None of Arthur’s words were lies, but neither were they true expressions of what he felt. He simply gazed up at the other man, calm as only the numb could be, and let Maximus read whatever he wanted in that.

* * *

Guinevere’s burning was far easier than Arthur had feared. He had imagined some wild fancy of muttering, sullen Britons and accusations from all directions, but instead everyone was quiet. Almost serene in the grief that distorted their faces. Merlin had somehow arranged it so the customary Briton taboo on burning the body didn’t apply here; Arthur had suspected the man was the Druid of the garrison, but Merlin had been too discreet to be caught at it. After they had come to know each other, and then to trust each other, the matter had ceased to be important to Arthur.

It was only a shell he was watching burn, only flesh he smelled in the smoke. There was nothing of Guinevere’s life here: none of her fire or her love or her strength. He’d already seen all that leave, and so this was merely a fulfillment of a promise.

Merlin gave Arthur a few moments alone with the ashes, but in the end, Arthur couldn’t think of anything he could say that hadn’t already been said, screamed or whispered. He and Guinevere had given their farewells to each other even before she had died, and all that was left was the feeling of warmth. A memory of dark shining hair and a wicked smile.

“It’s a long journey,” Arthur said as he handed the urn back to Merlin.

“I will keep these safe. And I will keep the story of you pure.” The other man bundled the small thing away, then clapped his hand to Arthur’s shoulder. A flash of white that might have been a smile went over Merlin’s face. “A good life to you.”

Arthur nodded, feeling a little of himself open up again. “And to you: officer, advisor, old friend. Merlin—when you reach Britain, can you stop by my parents’ graves? I’d—if you could—”

“I’ll do it.” As it was quite clear that Merlin understood what Arthur couldn’t manage to say, Arthur shut up. He squeezed Merlin’s hand, then stepped back and let the other man pass.

Merlin had nearly made it back to the garrison walls when a horse nickered behind Arthur. Turning around revealed a nervous, determined Lancelot sitting on a beautiful black stallion, and leading another by the reins. He stared at Arthur as if he was a drowning man and Arthur were a rope. “It’s over.”

“More or less.” And the small crack in Arthur widened a little more as he looked up and saw the heat flickering in the backs of Lancelot’s eyes.

Lancelot abruptly thrust the reins of the second horse at Arthur. “Ride with me?”

The wind kicked up, blowing away the last lingering smell of the pyre, and Arthur lifted his face into it. Then he took the reins and mounted, and he slowly led them away from the ashes.


End file.
